What determines which tape is used?

[Mittun]

Hi,

I have several volume pools eg. weekly_1, weekly_2,...., daily_Incremental and so on. I also have a scratch pool with several tapes. In the weekly pools I have labled the tapes specific to show in which pool the tapes reside. That makes it easier regarding vault management.

But I don't understand why netbackup sometimes picks a tape other than the tapes from the scratch pool. I have experienced that it sometimes uses tapes from the other pools eg. the weekly pools where the retention period has expired. Is there somehow a way to force netbackup to use new tapes only from the scratch pool and not from other pools?

@IM

 

[Stumpr]

NetBackup only pulls from the designated scratch pool. When a tape expires it is placed into the designated scratch pool. It sounds like your tapes expired and then were placed into the scratch pool where NetBackup then saw it was avaialable and used it for a backup.

Most sites have a barcode rule to place new tapes into the scratch pool and then have Netbackup pull from the scratch pool to populate the volume pool. You do not want to do this if you want the tape to stay forever in a volume pool.

Basic rule is that a tape will remain in the pool that it was initially created in. If that was the scratch pool then it will always go back to the scratch pool when the final image expires.

So if you want a tape to always be in the volume pool "Weekly" then it must initially be entered into Netbackup into the Weekly pool. You cannot create it in the scratch pool and then change it to Weekly.


Bob Stump
Just because the VERITAS documentation states a certain thing does not make it a fact and that is truth.