Tape not being utilised, causing status '96' fails

[pjtee]

Netbackup 7.0.1

Windows 2003

So I have three tapes in the same volume pool which are used to backup several servers over a weekend. I've setup two SQL policies, one starts a half an hour earlier than the other and is a higher priority (2). I need to make sure this one completes, its got all the production SQL servers, the other one isn't so important but still needs to run.

The problem is the second (less important job) kicks off, appears to take priority, stopping the other one, and once it completes the important SQL job fails its remaining jobs with status 96 errors.

My first thought was all the tapes are full. So I checked the size. Two of them are full (including the tapes that Important SQL job was using) and the third tape only has 28GBs in use.

So my question is, how do I figure out why Netbackup is not utilising this tape and deciding to fail all remaining jobs instead?

Any help greatly appreciated

Thanks

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

By default, NetBackup does not allow to write images of multiple retention levels on single tape. Tapes might be used by backups those retention level is different from that of important SQL backup.

[kunal]

Hi,

Take a look at the following technote which explains how Netbackup Selects media for backup.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH7354&key=15172&actp=LIST

Hopefully this will answer your question.

[pjtee]

Thanks, I forgot to mention that all Policies are set with a retention of 5 weeks, but I went over this again and noticed that the associated application backup was set to Infinity, which could have caused some confusion. So I've set that to 5 weeks aswell to make sure all retentions match.

Im hoping thats what it was. Thanks for the link, I'll have a proper read through this now.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Correct, the Application Backup schedule determines the actual retention level of the backup image.

Changing the schedule will apply to future backups and not backups already written.

If you want to update the images/media written with infinity retention, you can do that using the 'bpexdate -recalculate' command.

[Zahid_Haseeb]

See the below BLOG for your reference. Hope it will help you:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/unable-allocate-new-media-backup-storage-unit-has-none...

[Marianne]

@pjtee - Please let us know if you managed to resolve this problem?