Marking tapes as free

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

I have been reading about marking tapes as free in the User Guide.

Have I understood correctly when I say, that if I mark tapes as free, and then move them to the "Free" media pool, then these tapes are available for new backups, and can be overwritten, even though the data on the tapes is not erased first?

And when marking tapes as free, must those tapes be physically in the library, or could they be offline?

Kind regards,
PJ

[david.domask]

Hi Per,

Yes your understanding is correct -- Mark as Free tells Veeam to "forget" about what was written to tape (remove it from Veeam tape catalog) and flag the tape as overwritable.

Mark as free should be done with online tapes, but you can still move to Free media pool with offline tapes / library.

[perjonsson1960]

Thank you!

PJ

[vmtech123]

A reminder, that if you need to reload you Veeam environment, or do a catalogue, it's going to scan all those tapes and find all the old backups and take forever. Even an inventory might, it's been a while since i tested this.

I always recommend to erase or quick erase the tapes to blow away the data, or at least the header, then mark as free or move to the free pool.