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tape rotation question

Piltrafa
Level 2
Hi, everyone!! Well, I have a question, hard to explain it in english (I'm from Argentina), but I will do my best.
I have configured Netbackup (on HPUX) with one big spool of tapes, and all the policies use that spool to do the backups. But what I find out is that once a policy, lets say "unix01" is finished, Netbackup uses another tape to do the next policy "unix02", even if the first tape has enough space to backup both policies.
Maybe it's a configuration problem, basically what I want is to use each tape until it's full, and then load the next, and so on, and not changing the tapes everytime a policy begins. So, if I have ten policies, no mather how big is each backup, it will take at least ten tapes.
Please let me know if you could help me.
Regards.

4 REPLIES 4

Stumpr2
Level 6
There is normal behaviour in several different ways.
 
1. check retention as NetBackup, by default, does not allow mixing of retentions on a single tape
 
2. check storage unit as NetBackup media servers prior to version 6.5 do not share tapes
 
3. If a tape is not mounted then Full backups will often request a new tape instead of using one that has already been written to help minimize having images span tapes.
 
There are more possibilities butr this is a start.

Piltrafa
Level 2
Bingo!! You got it! With your help I realize that the tape rotation is done not by policy but by storage unit. And that is why it's changing the tapes, as I've installed version 6.0. You mentioned that version 6.5 will fix this behavior, so I will try to do the upgrade.

Thanks, your answer was 100% accurate.

huanglao
Level 3
Partner Accredited Certified
storage unit is a single or a group physical device/s.

and tape rotation is backup image/s life cycle on the tape.

Stumpr2
Level 6


Piltrafa wrote:
Bingo!!
You got it!
Thanks, your answer was 100% accurate.

You're welcome Smiley Very Happy