New User needing help - Which tape do I take out?!?

[MiddleWork]

Hi,

I have just taken over the backups from someone who has left the company (I havn't had anything to do with this before) and I’m not sure which tape I need to remove after running a full Friday backup (these tapes will then be sent off-site)

We are using ARCserve v9.0 (build 2020) on a Windows 2000 Server with a Plasmon Autoloader.

When checking the Job Record, under the media section it lists the following…

Media Name: FRIDAY
ID: 1A63
Seq. # 3
Serial No. 1900000

So do I remove all the tapes with the ID: 1A63 (This includes 3 tapes all of which were formatted during the Job) or just the one with the Serial 1900000? Logically I would say that all 3 tapes would need replacing as they all seem to have been used, however I want to make sure.

Also when I add a blank tape, does it need to be formatted first or will ARCserve come to do this when it uses it?

Thanks for the help

 

[Robalos]

First of all you should check the log for that job of that date into folder at \ARCServe\LOG. There you will see the name of the media used. If the size of the job was bigger than the capacity of the media it should have used more than a tape ussing spanning (this is, fragmenting the data into more than one tape). There is only one serial for each media.
If you open ARCserve manager and view the device or media pool you can choose the media or medias to remove and the slot where it is.
This is one manner, there are many. Tell me if you need more.

Best luck!

 

[MiddleWork]

I have looked through the logs and next to each session there is the following...

Backup Session 1 on Media FRIDAY Serial # 1000004

That tape is part of the Saved Set in the media pool and has little data on it. The other 2 tapes mentioned in the log's were...

Format FRIDAY as FRIDAY (serial # 1500000)
Format THURSDAY as FRIDAY (serial # 1900000)

Both of these have a large ammount of data on and with the total size of the backup being 367343.57 MB it would make sense that only the two tapes (1500000 and 1900000) would need to be taken out, is that right?

 

[Robalos]

Every tape used in a job will later form part of the save set (unless its configured with always overwrite and append) so I would remove the 3 tapes.
The Job renamed all of them the same way (but naturly different tapes so different serials) but contain the data of the job all of them.
Hope I explained,

Greetings from Spain,
Best of luck!

 

[MiddleWork]

Thanks for your help - By the way is that you Mike?

Anyway, from the Rotation Rules tab (after selecting Modify Job > Schedule) I can see that the mode is set to Overwrite. Does this change the decision to remove all 3 tapes?

Also when adding new media (to replace the ones taken out) do I need to format them? and should they be assigned to the media pool? Or are they both done automatically

Thanks again for the help - Very much appreciated