"Insert blank or overwriteable media"

[Nihility]

I have just switched our tape configuration to point at specific drives per the monday-sunday backups.

ex. Mondays differential will backup on  HP0002, Tuesdays will be on HP0003.  So on.  However, now what has happend directly after I have done this is my tapes are getting stuck in this whole 'insert blank or overwriteable media' mode when they are running their nightly backup, thus getting hung there until I come in the next morning.  

The way I have been fixing this is scheduleing a inventory, so that the device knows that there's space on the tapes.  Strangely enough, even if it remember the previous tapes that were in the drive it should have still have enough room to overwrite/append. 

Has anyone run into anything like this? 

I guess what i'm trying to ask is..  Is doing inventory once a week on my drives going to dramatically decrease my tape drives life?  If so, how could I make it not do this?

Thanks.

Message Edited by Nihility on 01-28-2009 09:15 AM

[Ken_Putnam]

I have always inventoried every time I switch tapes.  if you use bar-codes, a scan should also be sufficent

if what you did was label a tape, then move it to the appropriate media set, the OPP (Overwrite Protection) was reset as of the time of the move

What  you should do is label the tapes and leave them in the scratch media set, and let BackupExec move them when the job(s) run

You can also partition the loader so that each night will only write to a specific slot or slots so that the Friday tape does not get written to by the Monday job (for example)

[Nihility]

Well, that's when this started.  I made the partitions so I could have more control over what tape the job is using.  Previously it was just set on some sort of balancing trick with the tape that was next would do the backup.  But that inevitabily ended with me explaining why this was a bad idea, and why we should change it.

However- I'm not using barcodes,so I would need to run an inventory for it to show the appropriate tape.

What is strange to me is, this shouldn't be happening in the first place, if it 'thinks' that it's the old tape.  That should be fine, as we are running 4 sets of differentials, and the tapes never have an extreme amount of data on them.  They are set to append, and overwrite when full.  So me running an inventory seems strange.  I can run an inventory on the tapes after I change them out at the end of the week, and that seems to fix the problem.  But is this recommended?

[Ken_Putnam]

AFAIK, either an inventory or scan is the only way to tell BackupExec that a tape has changed

If you always Append to the same tape, sooner or later it will fill up, and you'll have to insert a scrach/overwriteble tape for the job to continue