Overwriting of tapes with same name but different ID's

[powersaj]

This is partly a request for help and partly a warning.

I have come across an issue with tapes being overwritten when two jobs give their respective tapes the same name.

Using AS2k SP4, on a Win2kSP2 platform, with a stacked library system consisting of 2*TL891's and a TL890 expansion unit. Slots are setup as group0 and jobs set to run to * media name, overwriting new or blank media. All media are erased prior to jobs running.

Job A completes successfully having written a seq of tapes eg "01/01/04 20:03 ID: ABC1" Seq 1 to 5. Then job B requires another tape as it is still running - it is writing to tapes "01/01/04 20:03 ID: 9ZYX" it picks up tape 01/01/04 20:03 ID: ABC1 Seq 1" renames it "01/01/04 20:03 ID: 9ZYX Seq 6" and continues backing up.

We do set our jobs to run at seperate times, but seem to have an issue which is causing one job to hang, before kicking all jobs in at once - hence giving the same date/time stamp as the tape name. It is essentially ignoring the fact that the tapes have just been written to. It cannot be ignoring the ID completely, because otherwise it would overwrite it's own tapes!

Has anyone experienced this, or got a fix from CA? I'm going to have to start setting the jobs to write to a particular tape name until this is fixed.

Just got a full technical report and risk assessment to do now.

Cheers, Andy.

 

[davidmichel]

Yes, if you have set tape name to * and you have multiple jobs starting at the same time, then different jobs could have the same tape name which could result in one job using another's tape.

If the job hang problem is not resolved then either as you suggest configure the jobs to use a specific name or set up different groups. That way one job will not be able to use a tape from a job running in a different group.

 

[powersaj]

Thanks - that pretty much confirms the conclusions I came to.

Having thought it through a bit more - ARCserve is not doing anything wrong, so thre will not be a fix.

Now jobs are set to run to a specific tape name.