overwriting tapes marked recycleable

[WhiteWiz]

Background:
been a Legato shop for a while
got a new LTO2 jukebox, installed and working except...

Problem:
have lots of tapes in the jukebox all marked as recycleable. When it comes time to do a backup Legato will not pick some of the tapes to write on, so eventually i get a failed backup when i accumulate enough tapes that Networker is prejudiced against. The work-arround is to remove the volume's file and media index entries.
Yes we are doing incremental/differential backups but all the tapes are older than 2 weeks and our full backups are done on a weekly basis.

Any clues as to what the problem is? Is there a report that will tell me what full tapes are still needed by Differential's that arn't expired?

 

[Chacalinc]

what is the retention policy for the index entries? note the difference between the current data and the index entries.

I had a problem where save sets had 1 week retention policy, but the tapes didn't recycle because the indexes had retention of 1 month! (this is a SAN storage node and DDS configuration).

 

[speculos]

The tapes are marked recyclable, so it's not a retention policy problem.

Did you set "Auto Media Management"=Yes for your new LTO jukebox?

 

[605]

NW's default behavior is to pich recyclable media in favor to new/unlabeled ones. The only issue i just can imagine is that somebody disable Auto Media Management for the jukebox.
BTW - i guess this might have come due to the fact that you just installed the new jbox - as far as i remember, the option is diabled by default and you have to correct this.

 

[WhiteWiz]

Retention Policy:
2 weeks (unimportant things are set to 1 week)
mail server was set to 1 month, just changed it to 2 weeks.

Automedia management: yes

 

[peerkiet]

Legato Networkers always holds one full backup. So in that case it doesn't mather if the tapes are marked as R.

 

[605]

To Peerkiet...

sorry, but this is not true. Yes, from the admin GUI you are not allowed to remove the last backup cycle. However, this is just a precaution - of course you can do this from the command line. Unfortunately, this has been implemented differently (to confuse the users) and has nothing to do with this issue.

 

[605]

Let's get back to the original issue and fact the facts.

1. It has been said that there are RECYCLABLE tapes in the jukebox.
So there are no dependencies any more.

2. It has been said that the temporary solution is to delete the index entries.
Consequently, NW does not know the media any more. It is the same situation as the jukebox has been filled with new/unknown tapes.

With auto-media-management, which has been confirmed to be enabled, it will label it again and use it.

The question just is why NW will not use recycleable media right away? - This looks like a bug. However, as you are long term user, it look like you have other NW systems as well, most likely running on other NW versions. Can you be a bit more specific?