Tapes disappear from BE when inventory on tape change is completed

[WTG]

I have BE 2012 SP1a installed on a Windows 2008 R2 server using a Tandberg Storageloader LTO4 1U unit.

I have 22 new tapes in total with barcodes.

When I inventory the new tapes they are identified correctly and are assigned to the SCRATCH media pool. I then allocate some of the new tapes to the DAILY pool I created and move on to the rest of the tapes (autoloader only holds 8x tapes)...

I then change the tapes and run an inventory, the new tapes are identified correctly and are assigned to the SCRATCH media pool. I then allocate these new tapes to the WEEKLY pool I created... BUT what I now see is that the DAILY tapes I just inventoried have disappeared from BE - totally gone!!!

SO - I then change the WEEKLY tapes back for the DAILY tapes and again run an inventory... What I now see is that the WEEKLY tapes disappear from BE (totally gone from the media pool) and these DAILY tapes are assigned to the SCRATCH media pool when previously I assigned them to the DAILY pool.

I continued to test this and I can only get BE to keep a record of the tapes currently loaded in the autoloader, as soon as assigned to media pool tapes are ejected and other tapes put in the previous tapes disappear from BE.

Anyone experienced this before as I am pissing in the wind here and have wasted many hours inventorying and assigning tapes to pools only for BE to forget about these tapes and assign them on an inventory back as scratch media.

I have raised a technical case for support and this has been escalated to the 'advanced' team but no-one has got back to me.

Anyone??? I have checked and so far cannot see in Window event logs any errors, what log file should I look at or should I enable debug logging to give me more visibility of what is happening for BE to forget the tapes and reassign them back as scratch media?

[Gurvinder]

If i understood that : When you move out the tapes the earlier tapes would show up under Offline Tape/Disk Cartridge Media in storage tab

Besides, you should not really have to do the moving of tapes to the media sets. if you leave the tapes as scratch , the backup job when it picks the media to write to would assign the media set which is mentioned in the backup job. 

[pkh]

Go to the BE installation directory, and use BEUtility to take a backup of the BEDB and then repair it.

As an aside, since you are using barcode labels, you can use do a scan, rather than doing an inventory.  They do the same thing, i.e. identify the tapes to BE, but a scan a very much faster.

[WTG]

Gurvinder Rait - No tapes are shown under Offline Tape/Disk Cartridge Media when they are removed.. they simply disappear from the system.

pkh - I already tried a BEDB repair and this did not resolve the issue.

My concern is that if I leave the tapes to be self managed by BE that when a tape change happens the tapes will disappear from the system and the staff managing the tapes won't have visibility through BE which tapes are assigned for daily, weekly or montly for when they need to replace the tapes. Also concerned that the system does not remember when a tape is entered that it was assigned/allocated to a specific media pool.

I will test today by having a backup complete to tape with it assigning the tape to the required media pool, then when completed will change the tape and see if this still disappears from the BE system.