Thats a good point I will look into it, btw we don't eject these tapes to send 
offsite Alphastor does ;-)  

savegrp parallelism is 16, client parallelism is default 4, Server parallelism 
is 96, each savegrp writes to a different pool, total 24 Tape drives in 
library.  We only backup specific mountpoints and drives (about 50 GB or more) 
so these saveset usually don't finish quickly.

Windows environment shows this behavior during backups (no cloning there) and 
Solaris environemnt shows it while cloning from the CDL to tape.





--- On Fri, 9/5/08, Davina Treiber <Davina.Treiber AT PEEVRO.CO DOT UK> wrote:
From: Davina Treiber <Davina.Treiber AT PEEVRO.CO DOT UK>
Subject: Re: [Networker] Tapes are labelled but not used, 0% appendable
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Friday, September 5, 2008, 9:17 PM

Ali wrote:
> Hi NW Gurus,
> 
> We find a number of Tapes (5 to 10 each day) in the library 
> that are labelled by NW but never written to. We noticed this recently and
looks 
> like this has been happenning for quite sometime and we have been shipping
0% 
> appendable tapes offsite for 30 days upto 7 years  . (I recommend you
should also 
> keep an eye on it).
> 
> has anyone seen this ? our group parallelism is set 
> to 16 and Tape drives are LTO2 in ADIC i2K library on a NW 7.3.3 running
on 
> Soalris 10 and another environment is Windows 2003 with same issue.

I can guess why NetWorker does this. It issues a mount request based on 
the number of streams outstanding. It kicks of label/mount operations 
for the appropriate number of tapes, but some operations take longer 
than others. Before all the operations have completed some of the 
smaller save sets have already finished so not all the tapes are needed. 
These tapes get labelled and never used.

This should not cause a problem, as next time a tape is needed, the 0% 
tape will get mounted, probably the next day. However if your procedures 
for offsiting are so badly broken that they call for empty tapes to be 
offsited this will never happen.

NetWorker is not at fault in this case, your procedures are. I suggest 
you fix them, and also recall all the 0% tapes you have previously offsited.

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and 
type
"signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to
networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this 
list.
You can access the archives at
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER





To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and 
type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to 
networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this 
list. You can access the archives at 
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER