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Here is what I want to do.

We have a 12 tape changer in use. I created a media set called 7 day hold. So it will start putting all our backup jobs on a tape until it fills up and then moves on. Right.

Well what I want to do is hold out a weekly tape. So I have a weekly master and 3 other jobs that run on Friday night. I would like to specify that all those jobs go to a specific slot on the tape changer. As well as not allow any other jobs to go to that slot. That way, I know every week I have all the masters on one tape, I pull that tape and take offsite into our rotation.

Does that make sense? Now, how in the world do I do that.

Notes: The jobs I have running on Friday night are seperate jobs that only run on Friday nights. I want them all to go to one tape which can hold up to 800gb. I want all the nightly jobs to proceed through the slots as normal. I am using backup exec 12.

That is all I can think of.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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  • I like both the comments below, so I incorporated both. I am lucky that our tape drive as two trays each holding 12 tapes. So I made a partition separating the two. The nightly jobs go to partition 1 and the weekly jobs go to partition 2. It worked last night. That way I have plenty of tapes in both trays and plenty of room. Thanks to your both for your answers.
    – jherlitz
    May 14, 2009 at 12:57

2 Answers 2

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What you need to create are partitions within your library, on the device page of Backup Exec. You would right click on your library, and select "Configure Partitions".

Then when you are creating your jobs, you assign the "Device" to be the partition that you created.

This way that job MUST use a tape in that "device", otherwise it will fail.

Media sets aren't used to select a tape, they just control the overwrite protection period and append status.

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  • I never knew about partitions before, this helps so much. I think my 16 slot autoloader will be put to good use finally!!! Question for you, any ideas on how to do a '5th Friday' tape, I have a job for a 4th Friday, and one for 'last friday'/monthly but if they run at the same time the last one will fail.
    – XTZ
    Jun 15, 2009 at 13:37
  • Do the jobs have different selection lists, or is it just an extra job for those months with a 5th friday? I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind an extra job.
    – Jeff Miles
    Jun 15, 2009 at 14:58
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Would it not be easier to allow the software to simply select any blank tape it wanted, and then report back to you on which tape it used via the barcode/serial number of the tape? Even if you could tell it a specific slot to use, I could see that being a bad idea. The job would fail if there was no tape in that slot, or it could overwrite data on a tape which was wrongly in that slot.

I am not sure of your libraries setup, but when I would want to do something like this using Tivoli Storage Manager, I would have TSM back up the data to a special storage pool, check the tape out for DR, and put it in the tape library IO door.

So after the backup job was done, I could simply walk down to my library, open the IO door, and there are all my tapes which need to go offsite.

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