You said: 

 

this is a brand new install. the old environment is so old that it was too expensive to upgrade it or buy something to hold both types of tapes. the ADIC is using DLT 8000 drives and we have the 40/80 GB tapes. the SDLT drives that can read them can only be bought from junk dealers.

 

since this is my first time setting up netbackup, it's a learning curve. and there is so much documentation it's too much to take in at once. when it discovered the robot, drives and tapes it automatically labeled them as dlt.

 

next week i'll probably change it to hcart. for now we'll probably use the old robot and server for old restores. but it has been flaky in the past and in case it dies for good we'll need to buy an old SDLT autoloader.

 

From your statements about how old the library and drives are, I expect you’re running an older version of NBU as well.  If you’re running NBU 4.5, LTO4 drives aren’t even supported. If you’re running NBU 5.x they are, but I expect the LTO4 drives show up as a DLT drive type because you don’t have an updated device mappings file that includes LTO4 drives in it. This file is updated as new devices are qualified with NBU and is posted on the support website, so it can be downloaded and installed on your system. NBU uses the device mappings file for automatic configuration and if the LTO4 drive doesn’t exist in that file, NBU is defaulting to use the most basic drive type related to a TLD robot type, which would cause it to be configured as a DLT type. Whenever we qualify new tape drives we update the device mappings file. A current device mappings file isn’t required for a LTO4 tape drive to work properly, but it is required for NBU to configure it as one of the hcart types.

 

You will also want to set up a barcode rule, so NBU automatically recognizes/configures LTO4 tapes as the same drive/media type as the LTO4 drive is configured.

 

The device mapping files can be difficult to locate on the support web site, so below are links to those files.

 

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/320857.htm  NBU 6.x UNIX/Linux

 

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/320858.htm  NBU 6.x Windows

 

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/297094.htm  NBU 5.x UNIX/Linux

 

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/297103.htm  NBU 5.x Windows

 

Don Peterson

Product Manager, NetBackup

Information Management Group

Symantec Corporation

www.symantec.com

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­don_peterson AT symantec DOT com