overwrite period

[574301820]

Hi. I have my Overwrite period and Append Period both set to 1 hour for my media set. The set is 10 tapes for a two-week weekday rotation. My goal is to overwrite the day's tape for every backup. My backup takes about 4.5 hours to complete. It worked great for two weeks. When I started my second rotation through the tapes, it seems like the backup pauses for 4.5 hours before it starts. It worked that way for two weeks. Now it seems to be pasuing for 9 hours before starting. I must have something set wrong on my media set, but I don't know what. I thought having both settings set to 1 hour would make it easy for me to overwrite tapes. Can I fix this, or even go a simpler route. All I want to do is init my tape each night and run the backup...I'll keep track of the tapes. Thanks.

[Keith_Langmead]

I'm not sure why you're getting the results you are, but I would say that you definitely have your overwrite and append periods set too short.

With Overwrite protection, when in effect it prevents you from overwriting the existing tape data until it has lapsed, and the clock starts from the last time you wrote to the tape. Equally, the Append period sets out the period of time in which you are able to append data to the tape, and this starts from the first time you try to write to the tape.

So with your situation, you would start the backup, and write to the tape, after an hour your append period will run out and you can no longer append anything. The overwrite protection period will now start. After an hour you will be able to write to the tape again for another hour.

I would suggest you want you overwrite period to be more like 7 to 12 days, to ensure the existing data is not overwritten prematurely, and your append period to be between 6 hours and a day, to ensure that you have plenty of time to complete the backup, allowing for the possibility that something may happen to prevent it from completing straight away, and you may want to restart it or something.

[574301820]

Thank you. I will know for sure tomorrow, but that makes too much sense not to be my solution. I never even considered the possibility that those timeout values could be valid - and the clock could be running - while a job was running. I assumed they were only relevant when a job was completed.

Thanks again.