Unpause/Unhold Devices

[timvan007]

I am currently backing up VMWare ESXi 5.1 vms using backup exec 2012 on Server 2008 R2. I back up to disk, then duplicate to tape for off site storage. My current issue is that I only have enough space to hold 1 week of backups on site on disk, and after I ship the backups off site, I can't restore immediately from them.

To overcome, I have been duplicating to a second set of tapes on site. When I schedule the duplicate job to run daily at a specified time, it errors out stating cannot find media set. If I schedule it to run immediately after the source backup, it has no issue. The problem is, if I want to duplicate to both sets of tapes, I can't schedule them to both kick off immediately following the source backup because sometimes they try to duplicate the same VM and error out.

I want to try and hold or pause a tape drive to offset one of the duplicate jobs by an hour, and then programmatically unpause the tape drive to allow the job to proceed. Is there any way to schedule a device to release the hold, or a command to manage devices that I can create a scheduled task in windows to do this?

[CraigV]

Hi Tim,

Never seen anything like this available in Backup Exec. Pause/Unpause is a manual process due to the nature of what it does...stop all transfers within BE.

Maybe consider putting this into an idea on the Ideas page:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/backup-and-recovery/ideas

Thanks!

[timvan007]

I understand the nature of the task, but 2012 has forced me to make changes to normal backup procedures just because of the software, so I am again trying to figure out how to make it work as I need. I found the cli documentation and there is a Set_BETapeDriveDevice -Paused [Boolean] that I am going to attempt to run as a pre/post command to my backups. There is no such thing as a manual task if a script can be written for it :)

[timvan007]

PS> Get-BETapeDriveDevice "Tape drive 0001" | Set-BETapeDriveDevice -Paused $true

FYI, this was the command I needed to pause (false to unpause). I'm going to give this a shot and see how it turns out.

[CraigV]

OK good, report back if it works or not!

Thanks!