Automatic Tape inventory

[Kerstin]

Hi Community,

I didn't find anything here except a feature request in a hurry, so I'm creating a new topic. If I missed a thread, feel free to improve me.

First of all, let's take a look at the state of affairs:
I have a tape job which backs up the current full backups of the past week, once a week. For this I have created a tape library where I can see the drives and media (online and offline). The backup works well.

Now to my problem, I have read all tapes (inserted and clicked on "Catalog drive") and then named. If no tape is inserted, I am still shown all my (16) tapes under "offline" (that is correct).However, Veeam does not automatically recognize when a new tape is inserted, I have to manually click on "catalog drive" each time.

For example -> Tape "W1" is inserted and is displayed under online. now "W1" is removed and replaced by "W2". But in Veeam B&R I still see "W1" as online tape and "W2" as offline tape.

What am I doing wrong? Thank you very much for your help!

regards, Kerstin

[lyapkost]

Hi Kerstin and welcome to our forums.

You have a standalone tape drive without a robot (changer), don't you? For tape libraries there's automatically triggered job Tape Library Discovery which refreshes tapes every 3 minutes. However, for standalone drives there's no way to figure out what tape is inserted other than read tape content. This is not triggered automatically, you can imagine how long survives a tape which's been rewinded every 3 minutes.

But the good news is that backup/file to tape job automatically reads the inserted tape before writing to it, so no mess is expected in your infrastructure, just make sure the inserted tape can be overwritten and the job will do everything else.

[Kerstin]

Hi lyapkost an thank you for the welcome and reply!

Yes I only have a standalone drive. Unfortunately, it didn't work last time that the new tape was read in automatically. The job aborted with the error that the tape was not found (clear for him was a tape online, which was no longer inserted).

I will test the whole thing again (unfortunately not until early January) and recreate the scenario.

I have set the"Add tapes from ree Media pool automatically when more tapes are required (Media Pool setting)
Also Media pool setting -> Retention -> Move all offline tapes from this media pool into the following media vault

Thank you,
Kerstin