Anyone using a Superloader and multiple Media Sets?

[TheydonBois]

We have a superloader and are using BUE2010.

 

I have 15 jobs set to specific tapes (Mon - Friday, week 1 -3) as I also have a remote agent backing up another server to the same tape. This allows me to have one tape with two servers from the same day.

 

What I am finding though is mysteriously, tapes are moving from one media set to another, so Monday 3 will end up writing to Friday 2, and when checking the media set, I find Friday 2 alongside Monday 3 in the backup pool.

 

They are Ultrium 3 400/800Gb tapes, the first server backs up 250-300, and the second server is backing up less than 50gb.

 

TIA!

[dyoung5]

Hi,

 

We have a similar setup with a Quantum SL and BE. What you are seeing is actually normal behaviour for Backup Exec. When it needs a new tape, it will pull an 'overwritable' tape from any media set that has one available. To achieve what you want, you could either adjust the overwrite protection periods, or setup different media partitions on the loader.

 

What we do, is we don't actually allocate our tapes to specific days or weeks, and just have one media set that BE uses for everything, BE then automatically uses whichever tape it thinks is best. We identify the tapes by barcode, but also stick a label with the date when we remove them incase the BE server is down and we need to find the latest set.

 

David

[TheydonBois]

That simply cannot be right, and totally defeats the object of creating seperate media sets.

 

I have created two jobs, one for each server, that I want to allocate to Monday 1 for instance. I then create a media set that contains my Monday 1 tape. Why on earth does it ignore specific instructions?

 

All the tapes have to have allow append and no over write period as other wise the second server cannot write to the same tape as the first for any one given day.

 

Edit: Just to add that the other servers are setup in the same way you mention, one job for all days that picks any random tape from the pool. Its just this one needs to be set speciifcally to make sure two servers from the same day back up to the same tape.

Edited January 19, 2011 by TheydonBois

[dyoung5]

You probably want to set the append period for the length of time that both servers take to backup, probably 1 day if you backup both in the same night and the overwrite protection period to be 1 day shorter than when it will be next needed, e.g. if you have 1 tape for each day on a 3 week rotation, you should set the overwrite protection to 20 days. This will prevent Backup Exec from using these tapes until the protection time has expired, and it is that tape's turn.

 

David

[TheydonBois]

Cheers David, I will double check my settings against what you have suggested.