Backup job with no available tapes lockes the Drive

[Novae]

Hi,

i have had the issue that we missed the Tape Exchange for one day.

So no tapes where available for the Monthly Backup (no issue so far)

but after adding the Tapes i needed to erase them before adding them to the GFS Media pool.
Thats should also been no issue, becauae both Tapedrives where Idle and my two Backupsjobs didnt start (-> no tape Available)

and now comes the point: Veeam didnt allow me to erase the tapes because both drives where Locked by the Jobs?!

i had to cancel one of them to erase the tapes...

Why?

I also had this issue a while ago, where i needed to add one more tape for an running job.
The job idled because no tape was available but i also couldnt erase the required tape because all (idle) Drives where locked....
so i had to cancle my job which already ran for over 60h and just needed to write another 200gb...

Is there an reason why the Drive doesnt get unlocked when the job needs to pause?
(Whis would also mean that, eg an job with just one tape would be able to stop (pause) all other jobs because he locks the Drive even when all other jobs could run)

May be there an option to change this in the future?
if not help me please to understand why the drive lock, without using it, is necessary.

best regards

[Dima P.]

Hello Novae,

Thank you for the detailed explanation of your issue. Unfortunately it's not possible to pause running tape job and release the tape device to perform any other operation but I've added your vote to this feature request. Cheers!

[lyapkost]

Hi Novae. There's no need to erase tapes in your case, just mark them as free instead, this operation doesn't require drives. The tapes will be erased automatically while new data is written on them.

[Novae]

Hi lyapkost,

yeah, thats new some versions ago there where problems to erase tapes who has been written with another backupsoftware.
Also currently i relable some older tapes and so the header need to be erased, because on the header is another labelcode written (so i'm not sure if the mark as free method would work)

Its not so common that this happens, but for me an "check if any tapes for this job are available" before locking the drive initially, would fix it.
If the tapes run out while the job is running, i would understand that the lock is maybe required. but not if nothing has been written yet
(Even if i would like to have the drives unlocked there also ^^ but i'm not sure if this is possible in this state)

Also Hi Dima,
thanks for adding this vote