Physical Media Label suggestions welcom

[mrbendy]

Hey gang, I am from the world of Backup Exec, where we admins label the media in the software with a name like "TAPE001" and then physically label the tape "TAPE001" and go on like that with hundreds of tapes. With Backup Exec, I would perform a restore and the software would ask me for "TAPE001" which I could locate no problem, I also knew how much append time etc was available for that tape based on the label.

So, what I am looking for help with is what I should be physically labeling my tapes when working with Arcserve. I know that I can label them with the software, but the tape gets a new software assigned label with the next backup job. Please, I'm begging you, yes you, please help me with this issue. I am working with about 40 tapes, none of them have labels, it's a nightmare! Thanks for your pitty/sympathy help.

 

[amacqueen]

Arcserve also assigns a serial number to each tape. You might want to consider using the serial number as your tape label.

 

[mrbendy]

Thank you amacqueen for the suggestion, I will try it out. I am just curious what other users have implemented for a naming scheme for tapes used with Arcserve. Thanks for the input.

 

[Thegg]

We never had much luck manually naming tapes in Arcserve as it always seems to label tapes with the current date & time.
The Serial number is really the only reliable unique identifier you can use with an Arcserve system, I've found.

Regards,
Edward

 

[NickFerrar]

Yeah I hate that you can't seem to get ARCserve not to overwrite the media label when it overwrites the tape for the backup. We have 'friendly' labels on our media and I'd like to be able to format tapes with the corresponding label and have this preserved but I don't think you can. We just load the tape to restore from, check it's serial number in Device Manager and use this for selecting the right tape within the Restore Manager.

 

[mrbendy]

I have started to label my tapes with the serial number, however, I have run into a little snag. I have multiple tapes with the same serial number (probably because the admin before me could not get the software to work correctly either and tried many different backup schemes) and some of them don't even have a serial number. Thanks again for your time guys.