confused about what's on backup disks

[Barb_Grajewski]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what's on any given removable disk (RD1000 drive, w/ either 320 or 160GB disks, running BE 12.5)

 So, inserting the disk, I then went to Media, Online Media, to see what the disk contains.:

Media Label    Allocated Date      Used Capacity      Data

B2D000232          12/10/2008             4.0 GB      5.13 GB

B2D000235          12/16/2008             2.7 GB      2.65 GB

FLDR000004         12/10/2008              0 bytes     0 bytes

IMG000008            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000009            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000010            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000011            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000012            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000014            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000024            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

IMG000025            1/1/1970                          0 bytes

From this, it would look like I've got a lot of nothing on the disk, 8 GB maximum.

So then, I take a look at the disk using Windows Explorer, and see a completely different picture;

Name                       Date Modified                                     Folder Size

IMG000008           11/27/2008                     25,164,189

IMG000009           11/28/2008                     25,189,884

IMG000010           11/29/2008                     25,135,544

IMG000011           11/30/2008                     25,125,391

IMG000012           12/01/2008                     25,132,804

IMG000024           12/16/2008                     25,002,357

IMG000025           12/18/2008                     25,227,695

VERITAS             12/10/2008                      8,156,225

and disk properties tell me I have ~175 GB used, 123 GB free.

Something's very strange here.  BE is also unable to erase the odd IMG "media".

ALSO;  It's impossible to figure out which disk contains which folders/files on them, because the media "labeling" doesn't make any sense to me, and short of sticking each disk in the drive I haven't figured out the "right" way to document what's on each disk as I put it through the rotation I'm trying to establish. 

I really am having a hard time understanding what's going on here.  With tapes, the TAPE had one media label, with multiple jobs on it, and if you labeled the media ONCE, you knew what the heck you had.  This "Backup to disk" stuff, when backing up to Removable RDX disks, just doesn't make sense to me.  Why can't you just label a DISK once like you do a TAPE?

[Barb_Grajewski]

On a related note, when I go to swap the disk cartridge in the morning, I find that I will sometimes end up seeing the folder info for BOTH the drive I just popped out and the drive I just popped in. 

Should a "drive" (external USB RD1000, w/ removable disks) like this act more like a disk drive, or a tape, in the way that BE can access it and tell you what's on it?  Do I have to Inventory disks each and every time I  swap one in or out?

I've now resorted to keeping an index card stored with each disk, and I note the date of the backup on the card corresponding to each of the 6 disks I'm using.  Soon that will grow to 12 disks.  There has to be a better way to do this.  What with both FLDRs and B2D files all listed on a disk, it's painful to keep this stuff all organized when I need to restore something.

What am I doing wrong here?

[Barb_Grajewski]

I'm bumping this.

I still have very little idea what's on the RD1000 cartridges, and which ones will successfully run a backup vs. which ones are full and not ready for overwrite.

I ran a "report" on one of the 160Gb cartridges and I got stuff like this:

B2D000745     27271701504     Infinite - Allow Append    22976724992     -445

B2D000747     27240592384     Infinite - Allow Append    22945615872     -208

I've got 4 pages of this stuff.  How can I have 800 B2D folders on one cartridge?

How the heck am I supposed to find anything?