Paul,
    I've seen the same thing in the past (sent a note to the list on the
subject a month or two back).  The behaviour
I see is that a backup job that would need, say, 10 tapes sometimes hiccups
in the middle of, say, tape 5.  The job
is then, correctly, requeued and tape 5 is written (over) again BUT the
earlier four completed tapes are quietly
forgotten about in a kind of "no mans land" from where they will be expired
(AFAIK) but in the short term it
means that lots of tapes are in an inaccessible limbo.  What I do when this
happens is to find the tapes in
question and use "bpexpdate" to expire them off and make 'em available
again.

    Maybe this dates from a time before backups could span tapes so the code
just "rewinds" to start of
current tape but doesn't run through an "outer loop" to deal with the
previously used tapes (since in the
case of a single tape backup there aren't any!).

    I guess there are two approaches here:

1)    No skill -- High $$$ -- just load the library with lots and lots of
tapes
        and don't worry

2)    High skill -- Low $$$ -- *very* carefully watch what is happening from
day to day
       and take the necessary action.

As I said, I do (2) (normally, anyway) but I can well imagine that the
potential risk (i.e. someone
having "finger trouble" and expiring the wrong media/images) is too great
for some shops where,
I guess, they just fork out for extra tapes (figuring that "fixed" costs
like media are cheaper
than lots of sysadmin time to sort the problems).

Cheers,

Richard.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Esson" <paul.esson AT redstor DOT com>
To: <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 10:58 AM
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Media fails to deassign


> Folks,
>
> I have a NBU v4.5 FP6 set-up on Windows 2000 SP4. At the moment I seem to
be suffering from a particular issue concerning available media. I have
noticed that when a job fails having written to a number of tapes the media
remains assigned to the particular pool that was associated with the backup
policy and an entry persists in the media db of the associated media server.
I expected the db cleanup routine that runs at the time of a catalog backup
to recover this media but it does not seem to be happening. I cannot see
anything obvious in the problems report. Can anyone shed some further light
on the matter?
>
> Paul Esson
> Senior Support Engineer
> Redstor Limited
>
>
>
> Direct:         +44 (0) 1224 595381
> Mobile:         +44 (0) 7766 906514
> E-Mail:         paul.esson AT redstor DOT com
> Web:            www.redstor.com
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>
>
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