Veritas 16 Tapes Media Type

[AndreyGo]

Hi all, what would be a correct setting for Media Type on Tapes that are being used to duplicate BE jobs? I have currently "End marker unreadable" warnings as you can see on the screenshot below. Would files/systems from those tapes still be restorable? Thanks! 

[Larry_Fine]

"end marker unreadable" is not specifically related to duplicate type jobs.  The media used for your duplicate jobs should have the same/similar "appendable until" info as the rest of your media.  There is nothing special about a duplicate job, it all depends upon the media set rules.

The "end marker unreadable" is an indication that BE attempted to find the end of the data on tape (typically when trying to do  an append job to that cartridge) and it was not able to find it, so it marked the tape this way to prevent going into an infinite loop and trying this cartridge over and over and over.  Generally this end-marker-unreadable is caused by an abnormal end to the job (disconnect, power fail, etc).  Generally, information up until the point of the abnormal end is able to be restored.

[AndreyGo]

Thanks Larry,

my question then when I replace 4 tapes at the end of the month with four blank ones, do I mark them all as scratch media?

Once I insert 4 blank tapes what should I set media type to on those tapes if I don't ever intend on adding more files to tape or tape being overwritten once it's removed from a tape drive and placed in storage (archived)?

I noticed that when there is not enough space on a tape to finish a duplicate job, the job gets stuck. I have to cancell it and restart it, then it finds next available empty tape and duplicates to that tape.

Thank you!

[Larry_Fine · Accepted solution]

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@AndreyGo wrote:

my question then when I replace 4 tapes at the end of the month with four blank ones, do I mark them all as scratch media?

Once I insert 4 blank tapes what should I set media type to on those tapes if I don't ever intend on adding more files to tape or tape being overwritten once it's removed from a tape drive and placed in storage (archived)?

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When you replace 4 tapes, the new tapes can be allocated to the Scratch media set, or they can be erased, or they might already be ready for use depending upon how they were used before. 

Do NOT manually place them into your target media set (as they will likely become instantly protected).  Let Backup Exec move them into your target media set as various jobs run to these tapes.

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@AndreyGo wrote:

I noticed that when there is not enough space on a tape to finish a duplicate job, the job gets stuck. I have to cancell it and restart it, then it finds next available empty tape and duplicates to that tape.

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Make sure that you are not missing an alert message from Backup Exec.  I suspect there is an alert that is requesting that you import another overwritable media or something.  You should not have to cancel a job just because a tape gets full.  Backup Exec will normally span between tapes without issue.  I don't think that cancelling a job will result in the end-marker-unreadable situation, but it might.

[AndreyGo]

Great, thanks again Larry, we do not erase tapes, we insert brand new tapes once a month and archive the ones that come out, I'll make changes as per your suggestion and get back if I have more questions.