Backup tape assignment

[smwoodcrafts]

We've been having problems with 96 errors on our VTL. We are in the process of expanding. In the mean time, we are expiring our virtual tapes to get the latest backup. Now an engineer is telling when we expire a tape, it keeps the info that it's a weekly or a daily or a monthly and if a back up is a weekly it won't use an expired daily tape. Is this the truth?
 

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

A free tape (a scratch tape)will be re-used for whatever request there may be. So a tape may in it's life time hold daily, monthly, weekly , arch01, arch02 etc. etc. etc.

I think the engineer meant that Netbackup will not mix retension (weekly vs daily) on the same tape when assigned (allocated for a retension). When a tape expire it will per default return to the scratch pool.

If you don't use a scratch pool, but dedicated volume pools for daily,weekly then he is right.

Hope it clarify.

Best Regards

Nicolai

[smwoodcrafts]

Thanks, I didn't think that sounded logical. He actually told someone to make sure he expired a weekly tape so that a job will run and we don't have dedicated pools

 

[Marianne]

Do you have a scratch pool? Are new tapes by default allocated to the scratch pool? In that case, expired tapes will go back to scratch. If not, i.e. new tapes allocated to specific pools, they will remain in their allocated pools after expiration. Verify in the Media GUI that unallocated tapes are in the Scratch pool.
Please think twice before expiring tapes - there's a reason for retention periods!