backup on the same tape

[mumair109917]

hi,

i have NBU Version 7.0.1 on windows 2008, i created new volume pool and assign number of tapes init all tape are "o" KB and assigntime is blank means all tapes are free and i have check that all tapes are unfreezed.

PROBLEM:

that pool is associated with a policy that runs daily full backup every time when job starts it writes the image on the different tape even the previous tape has more space empty LTO-5 and data size is just 5GB so just want to know is that normal behaviour or i can manage that first tape has to be full then use another one??

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Normally, NetBackup append data to media holding unexpired data.
There are some reason that NetBackup requests new unassigned tape for new backup.

• Retention level is different(mixed retention level in single media is not allowed by default)
• Tape is aquired by other running backups
• Tape is suspended or frozen by NetBackup Vault or some user-specific scripts

We need more detail about your configuration and current status. Can you post output of following commands?

• available_media
• vmquery -p pool_name
• bpmedialist -p pool_name
• bppllist policy_name -U
• bpps

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

This TN shows the details of how NBU selects media.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO32854

If I had to guess, I would image that the media was in use, another jobs started and so another ape ws used.  That would probably be the most likely cause.

You can force NBU to use only 1 tape, or 2 tapes etc ... at he time.  In the Volume Pool (x2 clink it) there is a setting to restrich the max number of partiallty full media.

eg. if this is set to 1 , only one media can be 'partially full at any time', so this media will be used until it is full.

2 things :

If you have some tapes, and they are not being sent off site (?) - does it really matter about what tape is used ?

Why are you not using a scratch pool ?  It seems odd to me, you by NetBackup and then manually move tapes to volume pools.  Why not have a scratch pool, put the tapes in there and NBU will take them as required.

Martin