Scratch Pool

[technimdaxviii]

Hi,

I've got interested to move our available tape to scratch pool. System was build by creating a pool and then assigning a tape. Sometimes, all my backup got failed due to no available media in the pool.

Is it still safe to move our tape to scratch pool whenever no data on it? As per checking, I have a "NetBackup'" pool, here I can find all the tapes not assigned. Is this consider as the "scratch" pool?

Thank you..

[Nicolai]

Using a scratch pool is compleatly safe - and recommended. You can only have one scratch pool.  A pool becomes a scratch pool when the "scratch" checkmark is set (see bewlo). The Netbackup pool cannot be a scratch pool. Create a new pool named scratch and checkmark the "scratch pool" field. Then take look at the "How to have NetBackup media return to the Scratch pool" technote (link below)

 Please take at look at thease tech notes:

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000124735 (About scratch pools)

http://www.veritas.com/docs/000108237 ( How to have NetBackup media return to the Scratch pool)

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.v95652367_nbu_core_admin_web ( About scratch volume pools - diffrent from the first)

[Marianne]

Please note that expired can only be RETURNED to scratch.
If tapes have been in a specific pool all along, you will need to move expired/unassigned tapes to the scratch pool manually.
Do this on a daily basis until all unassigned tapes have been moved to scratch pool.

You may also want to create a Barcode Rule to add all new tapes to Scratch (default is NetBackup). 
The below example is for hcart2 media. Select the appropriate density for your environment.

barcode tag:  <DEFAULT>
media type:   hcart2
pool name:    Scratch
Max mounts:    0 (no maximum)
description:  ---

[Genericus]

FUN with SCRATCH POOLS!

A. expired tapes return to the pool they were in, so you will have to manually move tapes to the new scratch pool as they expire.

B. Some version of netbackup have a bug, and the scratch pool can be impacted! I run a script that checks and updates the scratch pool

/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmpool -list_scratch  ( lists what NetBackup thinks is set as scratch pool )

/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmpool -set_scratch scratch_pool ( sets the scratch pool to be scratch_pool )

C. Please do as Marianne suggests, setting the barcode rule is important.