Problems with expired cleaning media

[twshelpdesk]

Hi all,

I am having constant problems with "bad/expired" cleaning tapes which keep causing my jobs to fail.

We get through a cleaning tape once every couple of months which seems crazy to me.

I want to reuse 'expired' tapes because I dont believe they truly are unusable.  Is there anyway I can totally remove the tapes and add them back to the new system as if they were a new tape?

[pkh]

Do you include the cleaning tapes when you do an inventory. Each they are inventories, it counts as one cleaning

[lmosla]

This is an often encountered issue please see  http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH193827 and the workaround.

[twshelpdesk]

Yes I include the cleaning tapes when I do an inventory (every day).  Guess it has used up the life rather quickly.

I have tried to delete the tapes and use a new barcode, but I still get the same message.  I guess it gets this information from cleaning tape media ID.

Oh well, guess I will have to buy a couple of new cleaning tapes and make it more of a manual process in future. 

[pkh]

Since you are using barcode labels there is no need to do inventory. A scan does the same thing as an inventory and it out a lot faster

[twshelpdesk]

Can you schedlue a scan in the same way you can an inventory?

[Larry_Fine]

Change the slot properties of the slot that holds the cleaning tape to indicate that it is a cleaning slot.  That will prevent an inventory job from using up your cleaning tapes.

[pkh]

I am not sure because I do not have a tape library attached to my test BE 2012.  Right-click on your library, select scan and see whether you can schedule it.

You can definitely use the Windows scheduler to run the BEMCLI cmdlet, Submit-BEScanJob at a certain fixed time.

There is no need to scan your library on a periodic basis.  You only need to do a scan after you have remove the magazines and change tapes.  A scan is very fast, a couple of minutes at the most.  This is because only the barcode labels are read. Unlike an inventory which actually read the tape in the tape drive which for a cleaning tape is equivalent to cleaning the tape head.

[twshelpdesk]

Thanks Larry, I will do that.