tapes "infinite - don't allow overwrite" contrary to media set

[Thomas_Bianco]

background: my company uses a rotating 4 week backup plan, where sets of tapes are changed every week, and recycled every 4th week. there are no monthly or yearly backups. each week contains 6 daily differential backups and one full backup. our backup set is 87 gigabytes, and daily differentials vary between 6 gb and 8 gb. the backup device is a Sony TESLA-11000 changer, with an 8 tape DDS4 magazine, giving us a weekly native capacity of 140 gb. with hardware compression, we're using about 45% of our capacity. media server is a Windows 2003 standard edition domain controller, backing up a handful of windows and unix servers.

as of about three weeks ago, any tape that is filled during a backup is marked "Infinite - Don't allow overwrite", despite being placed in a media set with a three week overwrite protection. media protection level is full, and overwrite method is set to recycle first. there are no events, alerts, or any other indications of a problem on the media server.

[Ken_Putnam]

All tapes except the last in a multi-volume backupset will display a Permanent OPP as long as you are still within the OPP. When the last tape passes the OPP, then all tapes should show up as unprotected (overwriteable)

Also, any tape that is full (or that BackupExec thinks is full) will show an APP of zero, since there is no room, for any more data. So all but the last volume of a multi-volume backupset will dislay APP of zero

[Thomas_Bianco]

i think your saying that all tapes of a given backup are marked "infinite" until the last tape goes off protection.

there are two problems with that:
1) this behavior is new, as of just over three weeks ago. this backup solution is over a year old, and no tape has ever been infinite until about a month ago. the last software upgrade was BEWS 9.1 SP4a, some 4-6 months ago, so i'm fairly sure this isn't new code.
2) tapes that are marked infinite are not expiring on time. that's what brought this to my attention, the first set of tapes to go infinite didn't expire on time for the full backup.

as for the append time, i was aware of that behavior, and it's working exactly as expected.

[Ken_Putnam]

Hmmm

I've seen this behavior since v9.0

Don't know what to say. You may need to open an paid incident

[Ajit_Kulkarni]

Hello Thomas,

As you have mentioned that since three weeks any tape that is filled during a backup is marked "Infinite - Don't allow overwrite". I would like to know if any changes were made in Backup Exec ?

Kindly update.


Regards



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[Thomas_Bianco]

about the same time we did a media replace, recycled out old tapes. beyond that, the configuration has been frozen for since January.

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

Please refer to the following technotes to check if Opp and App is properly configured

192265: The basics of Advanced Device and Media Management for Backup Exec for Windows Servers
http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

An explanation of the "Overwrite Protection Period" and the "Append Period"

http://support.veritas.com/docs/237374


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Thanks.