Tapes changing Media Sets

[Jody_Wong]

Has anybody ever seen tapes move to different media sets by themself?

[Ben_L_]

It is possible for tapes to move media sets on their own, so to speak.

For example:

Tape 1 - Media Set 1 - Overwrite Protection of 1 day.

That tape is used on Monday so now has 1 day of overwrite protection.
Now on Thursday a different job kicks off that is using a different media set and is looking for overwritable media.  The job does not find any scratch media or any available media in it's current media set, but does find that Tape 1 is overwritable since it's Overwrite protection has expired.  This job can now pull that tape and move it's media set.

So now that tape looks like this:
Tape 1 - Media Set 2 - Overwrite Protection of 1 week.

Hope that helps.

[AASchneider]

I have seen this.  To stop this behavior I have tried setting  Tools->Options->Media Management->Media overwrite options to "Overwrite recyclable media contained in the targeted media set before overwriting scratch media.

I am not sure if this will solve the problem as I have added many more tapes to the system at the same time as changing this setting.  It doesn't seem like overwritable tapes in a second media set should be considered "scratch media,"  but the Backup Exec engineers might have a different opinion.

Anthony 

[Ken_Putnam]

"Overwrite recyclable media contained in the targeted media set before overwriting scratch media"  is about all that you can do to get BackupExec to reuse tapes in the same media set, but if it can't  find one, it will still grab any tape that has passed the OPP

The only way to guarantee that a specific tape is written to (and only that tape) is to partition the library, and create separate jobs pointing to the appropriate partition