Tapes belonging to a media set not all being used !

[Pierre_Camiller]

Greetings all

Perhaps someone has encountered this annoying problem and can help me solve it. I wish that Veritas would respond to this e-mail. In the past they've never replied to my queries!

We are currently running BEWS 9.1 under W2K and I had created media sets for my monthly backups which contain two SDLT tapes. For example the 'Full June Monthly Backup' media set contains 2 SDLT tapes called June 6.0 and June 6.1 These were all brand new tapes which were successfully labeled.

When the backup was run it used the June 6.0 tape and then for some unknown reason it decided to use a different tape from a different media set instead of the June 6.1 tape!

This already happened on more than one occassion. It seems that BEWS seems to have some problem/bug. For your information I haven't installed the latest SP and am afraid to do it since I've read of many post SP2 issues.

Would appreciate very much if someone could help me solve this problem.

TIA
Pierre

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

Please check the overwrite and the append period set for this media set. Please refer the followign 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 Backup Exec for Windows Servers
http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

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[Pierre_Camiller]

Both tapes belong to the same media set so if the first one is used correctly then the second should be used also because both are inheriting the same properties set on the media set.
In the meantime I've installed SP2 and the latest device drivers package (45). I will see how it goes.

Thanks

[Ken_Putnam]

The only way to Guarantee that specifc tapes will be used by specific jobs is to parition the library (i assume that you are using a library) Think if the partitions as virtual tapoeo drives.

From the devices tab, right click the library\Create Partition. Then change/create your jobs to point to a specific partition. Partiutions can be more than one slot, and you can still point jobs to the library as a whole if yo uwihs

You can come close to using specific tapes with proper media management, but cannot guarantee it.

As to why the second tape is not from the correct media set, do you have "Use Overwritable Tapes in Target Media Set before Scratch Tapes" selected (Tools\Options\Media Management I think)

If this is not selected, Backup Exec will us the "oldest" tape that it can see, regardless of what media set it belongs to. Oldest meaning in scratch status longest.

[Ashutosh_Tamhan]

Hi Pierre,

is the issue still there?

Regards,
Ashutosh

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