cyclically overwrite

[ejenner]

Hi guys,

Anyone able to confirm if this means what I think it means?



I think it means it won't overwrite the tape until there are no more free tapes in the pool.

When all the tapes in the pool have been used it will start at the beginning and start writing over the earliest tape used?

I'm worried it could mean every job begins on the first tape in the pool and writes to as many tapes as required. The next job starts at the beginning overwriting the job that ran just before it?

So which way around does the logic work here?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi EJ,
Picking an empty tape within the pool have higher priority than overwrite, so yes, we will pick empty tapes first and start overwriting only when there is no free space in the entire media pool.
Whole priority list looks like this:
1. Tapes with data and free space on them
2. Empty tape from the pool
3. Expired tape (overwrite)
4. Empty tape from default "Free" media pool if correct checkbox was set to allow Veeam to automatically add cartridges from Free media pool
Hope that helps!

[ejenner]

yes, that's helpful.

If I select 'never overwrite' does that mean Veeam will only ever write once to the tape regardless when and how it is presented to Veeam? Would it have to be wiped before it could be used again?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Veeam will never overwrite any data on the tape if [x] "Never overwrite data" is selected. And yes, you can either wipe it via "Erase Tape" option, or set a different retention in the media pool settings for Veeam to start using same tape again.

[ejenner]

The issue here is that we rotate a few sets of tapes so if the overwrite settings are wrong we could find it won't write to a set of tapes due to our incorrect expiry settings.