Spanning multiple tapes

[Alex_Leung]

I have a Dell PowerVault 136T and it has 4 tape drives in it.

Hypothetically, say I have 2 tapes loaded into the library's slots and each tape has a capacity of 50Gigs. Say both tapes already has 5Gigs of data written to them from other jobs. If a new jobs that requires 60Gigs of space starts to run, it'll append to one of the tapes first. But when it runs out of space on that tape, instead of appending to the second tape, it sits there and asks for more overwritable media. Is there a way to set the job to just grab new tapes to append to?

[Hywel_Mallett]

No. If a job fills a tape, then subsequent tapes can only overwrite, not append.

[Alex_Leung]

Thanks for the quick reply.
Just what I thought.
Problem is that I have over two dozen jobs of varying space requirements. I have tapes with a capacity of 149Gigs. Jobs that are only a few Gigs in size are fine. But I have an Exchange backup job which runs into almost 100Gigs. Very often the job will end up appending to a tape which does not have sufficient capacity and when it runs out of space, because all other tapes already have data on it, the job will sit in "queued" mode indefinitely waiting for overwritable media.

Is there a way to fix this if I have jobs which regularly need to span multiple tapes?

Thanks for that link btw. Looks extremely useful.

Message Edited by Alex Leung on 04-04-200708:50 AM

[rw]

Alex, see if this helps:

We use BE 11D and a Dell PV 124T LTO 2(only one drive).   Currently we only have to use one tape for our backups but are nearing the point of multiple tapes.

Go into BE and click on the Devices tab.  Expand the the Robotic Libraries, RT Click your PV136T and then select Configure Partitions.  Add more slots to the partition you need or partition all of them.  I read about this somewhere and this should allow you to use more than one tape for the backup.   

Hope this helps!

[Greg_Meister]

Alex,

Just to clarify the previous post; once you configure partitions within the library, be sure to modify the jobs to use the designated partitons as opposed to "All devices"

Greg

[Alex_Leung]

So just to clarify, if I set these slot partitions and assign jobs to the partitions, then the jobs will know how to append to multiple tapes if they run out of space on a tape? I.e. If a job runs out of space on the first tape, it will append (not overwrite) to a second tape even if it has data already.

[Greg_Meister]

No, there is no getting around this limitation. The design of the application is to avoid having 10 - 1gb pieces of a backup job scattered across 10 tapes in a library.