Tape set confusion ...

[Erik_Woltmann]

Good morning,

I've some logical problem with BE 2010 R3: We use a Quantum i40 tape library with two magazines to backup our SAN. To organize the tapes we use the left magazine for the daily tape set (allways in the library) and the right one for the weekly tape set (changed every monday). So I've configured two jobs and two Tape sets in BE 2010 R3, one for the left with 5-day overwrite protection, one for the right with always overwrite. Everything is full functional, but sometimes BE seems to be "intelligent" and uses some tapes from the wrong tape set, one example from this weekend:

The weekend job is configured to use the "right" weekly tape set / magazine. There are a few temporaly tapes and enough over writeable in the right magazine available - but it use one over writeable tape from the "left" daily magazine. Why? Every Job is configured to use one static magazine / tape set, why is BE changing this and re-join the tapes to different sets?

Many thanks.

Erik

[Kiran_Bandi]

You have to create partitions in your library to do so.

Create a partiion with left magazine slots and another with right magazine slots and target your daily and weekly jobs at respective partitions. So, when the job starts BE will looks for a media only within that specific partition. If no usable medias were found, job will fail. BE will not use medias from other partitions.

How to create and use Robotic library partitions: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH27909

[pkh]

BE uses tapes in the sequence outlined in the document below

How Backup Exec searches for overwritable media

This is designed so that your jobs will not fail if there is an overwriteable tape available in the library.  It will only use tapes from other media sets if there is no suitable tape in the targeted media set.  If you partition your library, then BE will not be able to use a tape from another media set if it is in another partition and your jobs will fail.

You should examine your OPP and make sure that there are overwriteable media BEFORE the job starts. The OPP of a media starts from the end of the job that writes to it.  For example, your daily jobs starts at 10 p.m and ends at 11 p.m.  If you set your OPP to 1 day, then the tape will only be overwriteable at 11 p.m. on the next day and thus will be not be overwriteable when the daily job starts at 10 p.m. the next day.  In this case, the OPP should be set to at most 22 hours.