Tape has space left still veritas server asks for another tape

[rajesh_aec]

Even though the tape size is 72 G and the total backup ammount to be
backedup is less than 50G the veritas server asks for another tape.

Any inputs on above is really appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[DavidParker]

Tape capacity is a very relative thing, Rajesh.
It depends greatly on how much compression is achieved and the nature of the data involved.

$0.02

[J_H_Is_gone]

And if you say that an image is not allowed to span volumes it will ask for a new one.

[netbackup_rooki]

are your jobs writing to media in same or different volume pool

[Anton_Panyushki]

It might be that some of the images that were written at the beginning of the tape have already expired. In other words you may have free space at the beginning of the tape, but you can't use it, since a tepe is not random access device.

[rajesh_aec]

Thanks for answers !!!
 

There is only one volume pool .

Well actually let me explain more.

Allways we use 72G tapes and re-cycles them once they expire.

When we use a new tape, the backup is always successful. But this is not the case with expired tape. We tried the following to erase any infomarion about the header from the tape , since the software does something when it recognise this tape being used before, and then what it looks like it backs up not from the begning of the tape. (since we can see it positioning the tape after some 100 odd files.)

So we planned to use some native solaris commands to have this header taken off for veritas to treat it as a new tape.

"mt erase" didn’t work, so we tried to do an "mt eof" after an "mt rease". This seems to be working for a few days now. But we are not sure when this problem will occur again.

So bascially our expectation , is a proper handling of these tapes, so that expired tapes can be properly reused.
 

[J_H_Is_gone]

Is this an expired "tape" or a tape that all images have expired on?

There is a difference and I would like to clarify what we are talking about before going deeper.

When you looked at the tape in netbackup (prior to the erasing stuff) did it have an assigned date?
if yes
  then

   All images were not expired on tape

else

  No valid images on tape)

fi

This means it should have reused the tape but if it was still 'and expired tape'

then could you have set an expiration date on the physical tape? ( yes this can be done is is quite often confused with expiring images)?