Not Appendable (Media Full)

[Jeff_Allen]

Most of my media is getting tagged as Not Appendable (Media Full) under Append until category. even though it is overwriteable. I have 60 new SDLT tapes using a brand new SDLT320 drive with compression enabled. some of the tapes are going through the cycle fine and the majority of them are tagged like this. This is on a fresh install of BE10 with SP1 installed. any ideas?

[Jeff_Allen]

Another thing I have noticed is that this is happening on all media where I get compression of about 1.8:1 or roughly 250GB-270GB per tape. Why does BE10 have problems releasing them when overwrite protection expires?

[Michael_McKenne]

What happens when you do a overwrite to tape instead of append? 1.8:1 compression is very good. I get 1:1 to 1.3 : 1 compression on various backups. It depends on what kind of files you have. Some files don't compress at all: Mpeg, SQL, Pictures.

How is your backup job configured? If you are doing appends to a tape, you could get tape full. Can you give more information.

[Jeff_Allen]

I have overwrite protection set to 6 weeks and Append set to Infinate, Allow Append... This is the way the last admin had it set and I haven't had this issue with this setting in 8.5,8.6,9.0 and 9.1 until I moved to the BE10 server a few weeks ago.

[Ken_Putnam]

Overwriteable and appendable are two completely separate things.

If you have completely filled a tape, then whether it is still within the OPP or not, it is not appendable, since there is no place to add more data.

As soon as the tape is re-used, the Append Time should go back to Infinite (unless you fill the tape up again)

[Jeff_Allen]

my question still remains, how do I use these tapes again? the OPP expired last week and the tapes are still showing as not being able to be used.

[Ken_Putnam]

If your jobs are Overwite, you should have no problems ovewriting then after the OPP has expired. If you inventory one of these tapes, does the info appear in blue or black?

(remember that OPP is figured from the time last file of the last backupset was written to the tape, whereas Append is figured fromt the first file of the first backup set written)

[Jeff_Allen]

the info appears in black with the Overwrite Protected Until status of "Overwritable"

Right now, all of my jobs have the default of "Append to media, overwrite if no appendable media is available"

So from what I understand is if there are no tapes that show up as overwritable and are blue, it will then search for the tapes that are overwrittable and are black?

Is there a way to stop this? I never had this in past versions and it is rather annoying.

[Ken_Putnam]

OK -

Something strange is going on here. Blue means Overwritable, Back means protected. By any chance, have the write protect tabs been moved to the protect position on the cartridges themselves?

The way that your jobs are defined, they will first look for an appendable tape in the media set specified by the job, if they cannot find one, then they will look for an overwritable tape (one that appears in blue when inventoried). If they cannot find one of those, they will prompt for an overwritable media and wait for a response.

[Jeff_Allen]

Thanks Ken, I will look at the tapes tomorrow when I am in the office. I will post my findings then.

[Jeff_Allen]

OK, I looked though all of my media and none have the write protect tabs moved to the protect position. One thing I did notice was that all media was set to Media Type: DLT when in fact it is SDLT 1: (1800ft, 160GB) I guess BE does not know the difference :( but this makes no difference and still does not explain why some tapes are overwrittable and all tapes above 233GB compressed are shows as Full and no longer useable.

[J_Watts]

I'm having a similar issue. Allow me to elaborate and perhaps I can offer a different perspective.

I have a media set w/ OPP of 5 days and infinite append.
My tapes in this set all state Overwritable if older than 5 days which is what I want.
The COLORS vary, tho, based on the Appendable Until column. Blue tapes are "Infinite - Allow Append" and black tapes are "Not Appendable - Media full".

However, as I stated, this media set should have infinite append to ALL tapes in this set, only an OPP is set. In 9.x, blue was overwritable and black was not. This appears to have changed in v10 for reasons I do not understand.

Am I being clear?

[Jeff_Allen]

Hi,

I seem to have the same problem as above... although I cannot write to these tapes after the OPP has expired. I have since put in 16 tapes that the OPP had expired on, set the media type to proper SDLT-1 160GB then erased them. All that this did was increased the amount of data I can get on the tape... I am now getting between 270-310GB per tape and they still get marked as Media Full. Would someone from Veritas please shed some light on this as it seems to be a common problem if other are having it also. (this is a moderated forum is it not???)

[Jeff_Allen]

Well, according to the article below, Veritas knows about this problem and they are thinking about fixing it. Only thing is... I can't use this media as BE thinks it is still protected....

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/275777.htm

They have no plans to release a patch as they claim it is only "cosmetic" tell that to my server when I have to erase the tapes just to be able to use them again!!!

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

As this is acknowledged defect we suggest you call VERITAS telephone support as this would require one-to-one interaction with a teschnical support engineer.

NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked
assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.