Noob question, the "---" group

[PrisonPlanet88]

Fairly simple question. What is the --- Volume Group? Why are ejected tapes from the tld going into the "---" Volume Group, when I figured they would go into the "Offsite"Volume Group. Was "---" added with 6.5? We have a home scripted "vault" that pulls a picking list from the "Offsite" group, "Scratch" pool. Im worried that tapes are not being pulled from the "---" group when they expire and become scratch.

Solaris 9, NB 6.5,

Thanks,  

[Dion]

The "---" volume group is where media get's put by default when they are ejected from the library manually or by script (it has been around for a long time).  If you have an offsite volume group configured, you will need to change the volume group of all ejected media to this offsite volume group.

Note that there is a difference between the volume group and a volume pool.  The volume group describes the location of you media while the volume pool is what you configure as a destination pool when making the backup.

[PrisonPlanet88]

Simple explanation. Thanks! When the tapes images expire do the automatically go into the scratch group? Because, there is alot of tapes, about 50% in the scratch pool / "---" volume group...im assuming because they have expired.

Thanks again

Message Edited by PrisonPlanet88 on 07-22-2008 02:45 PM

[Dion]

A tape will return to whichever pool it originated from i.e. before it gets assigned (does not contain any data).  As soon as a tape get assigned it will go the the volume pool that you've specified and once all the data has expired it will return to the originating pool.

A tape is in the "---" volume group when NetBackup does not know the whereabouts of the media.  As soon as the tape returns to the library it will be assigned to your "tld" volume group automatically.  So, your scratch media that are in the "---" volume group are media that are available to write to but NetBackup cannot find them in the physical library (probably ones that were removed from the library as some stage and are now available to reuse)