Move tapes between media pools

[adde]

Hi,
I appreciate if someone could help clarify “Mark selected tapes as free and move them to the selected media pool."
See my example below.

What happens if I run a backup on tapes in a media pool with 3 weeks retention and after the backup is finished I move the tapes to a another media pool with 11 months retention?

When I do this, Veeam warns that the "Mark selected tapes as free and move them to the selected media pool."

What does this mean?
Are the backup on the tapes erased or somehow could have a negative effect if I later need to restore from them?

Will the tapes inherit the “new” 11 month retention period or are they “free” so they don’t have any retention period on them so if I would screw up and take the wrong tapes later on, I could overwrite these tapes?

Best regards Anders

[nikolaj]

Hi Anders,

Could you please clarify why changing the retention policy on your current media pool will not suffice?

If you change the retention on your current media pool and click Yes, it will be applied to the tape.
If you want to move the tape into another pool, then once done, one must:
- catalog the tape
- change the retention in the settings of a new media pool and click in the corresponding pop-up

And yes, once a tape is marked as 'free', the next backup job run will rewrite the data on it.

Thanks.

[adde]

Hi nikolaj,

Could you please clarify why changing the retention policy on your current media pool will not suffice?
Yes, we run backups on weekly basic with a retention period of 3 weeks.
And in the end of each month we take a "monthly" backup with different tapes that we want to have a retention of 11 months.

I am not 100 % sure, but I think our Tape Drive is set up to run backups only from our "Weekly" media pool, and it can’t automatically run the monthly backup if the tape are still in the 11 month retention media pool.
So in the end of each month we move tapes to the “weekly” media pool, take the backup, and then move these tapes back to the 11 month media pool.

[nikolaj]

Hi Anders,

With this kind of setup, I think you'd be better off with a GFS media pool.
That way you can have a tiered retention policy scheme per media set.

[KnB567]

Hi Anders
I have just experimented with moving tapes between media pools.
Veeam will mark the tape as "free" before moving it to another pool. This deletes ALL headers and marks the tape as empty.
There is nothing to Catalog after moving to a new pool.
Like you we have an extensive daily media pool and periodically need to remove media from that pool for archival and other purposes.
GFS is not a solution here for us as some content is not reliably backed up to tape (have lodged several cases on this without a successful answer). So we have to manually select the best tape to archive, even if it is not strictly generated on the actual EOM/EOQ/EOY dates.

To prevent overwrite of the tape selected, you have to mark it as Protected. This alone prevents a tape being moved between pools.
You can use a Vault and move a Protected tape into that Vault, but it remains in the Daily Tape Pool.
Many of these "archive" tapes will be preserves for many years, so they just clutter up the Daily Tape pool.

So - to Veeam - is there a way to move tape media between Media Pools that is non-destructive?
Ray

[soncscy]

Hi Ray,

>This deletes ALL headers and marks the tape as empty.

Umm...absolutely not I just tested this several times in my lab to be extra sure since I've done this many times before and it did __not__ touch the tape. The tape catalog data is cleared, but this is purely a logical operation as I see it. Cataloging the tapes returned the catalog information.

Are you sure you didn't add in an extra step? Cause I can move tapes freely without losing data; you just need to catalog them after the move.

[KnB567]

Hi Soncscy
My bad - you're quite correct.
I was mixing up "Catalog" and "Inventory" processes.
Interesting side effect - if the tape being catalogued is in the Free pool, it gets returned to its original media pool.
I'm off to the fridge to get a slice of humble pie!
Ray

[Dima P.]

if the tape being catalogued is in the Free pool, it gets returned to its original media pool.

Sure, tape media contains all the needed info to provide the ability to recovery the data even when entire Veeam B&R is lost completely, so when you catalog the tape - you rebuild the information about data on tape for Veeam B&R. By the way, same works to restore tape tape which was 'marked as free'. You can catalog such tape and see it's content again. Thanks!