help with media rotation (new guy)

[Michael_DePew]

I'm still in the process of learning the ins and outs of Veritas Backup Exec 10. I'm using it wtih a Dell PowerVault 132T robotic tape library.

I encountered a problem. I had 2 tapes, in 2 different media sets, call them A and B. The 2 media sets had no other tapes in them. The tape in set A ran out of space, and Veritas pulled the tape from set B into set A to complete a backup one night. I did not desire this behavior. I instead would have liked the tape in set A to just start being overwritten from the beginning once it filled up. Does anyone know how to achieve this? All of our tapes are allocated to a media set, so there aren't any spares. I just want 1 tape in set A to be appended to until full, then immediately be overwritten with new data. Here are some of my settings:

Media overwrite protection level:
Full

Media overwrite protection:
Append to media, overwrite if no appendable media is found

Overwrite protection period (for both media sets)
0 hours

Append period (for both media sets)
Infinite

Thanks in advance for any help, advice, or constructive criticism. =)

Mike

[Michael_DePew]

Anybody have any ideas?

Mike

[Bill_Staehle]

I don't believe your scheme of a single tape will work because the last appended job on the tape, once full, will need to continue on a second tape. You'll need at least two tapes in the media set. If you have two tapes in media set A loaded in the changer and the overwrite period has expired, the system should take the tape from the same media set before using one from a different media set.

Also, you can create partitions in your library so the backup jobs will take tapes only from the targeted partition. I do this to separate my email backups from my regular backups. Put your different media sets in different partitions and the system will never reassign a tape to a different media set. If no capacity is available in the target partition the job will fail.

[Howie_Goodson]

Backup Exec appears to have a design flaw in the way it handles Media Sets which can result in lost data due to overwritten tapes.

See this link for a workaround:
http://forums.veritas.com/discussions/thread.jspa?threadID=57923&tstart=0

[shweta_rege]

Hello,

To understand better the process of media management, please refer to the following technotes:

1. The chapter on 'Managing media' on page 191 in the administrator's guide :
Title : VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) 9.1 for Windows Servers Administrator's Guide (English)
http://support.veritas.com/docs/266190

2. Title : The basics of Advanced Device and Media Management for VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) for Windows Servers
http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

3. Title : An explanation of the "Overwrite Protection Period" and the "Append Period"
http://support.veritas.com/docs/237374


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