a customer uses a HP autoloader. Every three weeks they rotate the tapes from either the left or the right magazine und place those tweilve tapes in their safe. They own four complete tape sets, so every time both magazines are inserted and full. The goal is to use one magazine for three weeks, have the last three weeks available in the other magazine, three weeks in their safe and another three weeks in their safe deposit box. To prevent Veeam from using the wrong magazine, we set the protection after those three weeks. This works pretty well, but now they started to replace the old tape on every change. Since in those three weeks only six to seven tapes are beeing used and it's not possible to protect an empty tape (which makes quite sense off course) we cannot prevent Veeam from go on using the wrong magazine.
So, my question is if (and how) it's possible to create a script that prevents either slot 1-12 or 13-24 from beeing loaded into the drive. Is there any way to archive this?
I thought about moving the other tapes into a dedicated "inactive" pool, but I totally forgot that this marks those tapes as free, which is not the best solution...
Then I thought about using Get-VBRTapeMedium to return the slots and somehow disable them, but this command only returns "Location : Slot" which is kind of useless.
What I'm trying to avoid is to eject the whole magazine.
Does anyone have an idea, how I could do this?
Thanks & best regards,
Eike