Spanned tape not inheriting media set properties

[Chris_Knapp_2]

Hi All,

I have a job that runs every 4 weeks, set to overwrite the media. It pulls from a media set with an overwrite protection of 6 days, no append. The media set is shared by 3 other jobs (comprising a 4 week cycle of jobs) The media set has 8 tapes; 2 of which are in the autoloader at any given time. The job runs fine. It fills the first tape, then moves to the 2nd tape. The 1st tape's overwrite period gets changed to Infinite, but the 2nd tape inherits the media sets overwrite period correctly (with a date 6 days from now.) Why is this? When my job runs again 3 weeks from now, with that 1st spanned tape in the autoloader, it won't get written to and my job span & will jump to another media set, causing a big mess. How can I get the overwrite period to go back to normal on that tape, without moving it to scratch or into another media set manually?

[priya_khire]

Hello,

While creating the job, are you choosing the media set with overwrite protection period of 6 days? Are you running any other jobs on it apart from the job in question? While choosing a tape for backup, Backup exec takes the oldest tape. Also, even though you have set the the Overwrite protection period to 6days, it takes effect every time you write to tha tape, starts at the end of each job run. For more information, refer to the following technotes:

Title:An explanation of the "Overwrite Protection Period" and the "Append Period"
http://support.veritas.com/docs/237374

Title: The basics of Advanced Device and Media Management for VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) for Windows Servers
http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

In case the above does not help, do write back to the forum with details. However if we do not hear from you within two business days, this post would be marked ‘assumed answered’ and would be moved to ‘answered questions’ pool.

Regards.

[Chris_Knapp_2]

Yes, I am pulling from the media set with 6-day overwrite protection.
Yes, 3 other jobs share the media set. Its a Friday Job: Week 1 Friday through Week 4 Friday. There are 4 total jobs, 1 per week. There used to be only 4 tapes, 1 for each job. This worked as expected for the past year. In anticipation of filling up the tape, I added another 4 tapes to the media set a month ago. There are now 2 pieces of media in that set in the loader at any one time. (The remaining 6 are kept off-site.) The new tapes are being used because the jobs have overwritten them occasionally.

The job runs fine, however, after the first tape is filled up, it is marked as Infinite Overwrite Protect, and placed back in the media set that has 6-day overwrite protect. The job then mounts the 2nd available tape in the media set normally. After the job successfully completes, the 2nd tape is placed back in the correct media set, however its overwrite period is normal: 6-days.

This problem only started to happen once the job began to span to the 2nd tape, about 3 weeks after I added the 4 additional tapes to the media set.

Windows 2000 SP4
BE 9.1 Rev 4691
HP SSL1016 Autoloader (16 slots, 1 drive)
LTO2 tapes

[Chris_Knapp_2]

After re-searching the KB, HotFix 3 appears to address this problem. (apparently, according to phone support, HotFix 3 was re-released after it was NOT rolled up into SP1 as indicated late last year.)

Solution appears to be to apply HF3 or SP2 (which is supposed to have HF3 rolled up into it.)