manually move tape out of retired media pool

[ame]

Hi,

because of tape drive cleaning errors two tapes have been moved to the retired media pool - I am not able to move them to the free pool. Erasing them doesn´t help as well. Is the workaround taking them out of the library, erasing them from the offline tapes and insert them again still actual? This is a really old topic - when will it be fixed? This workaround is not really practicable when your tape lib is not onsite....

Regards
Alex

[veremin]

You can try to move those tapes out of retired media pool via PowerShell or ask support team to correct the certain property of these cassettes inside product db (IsRetired or something similar).

However, typically we get this sort of information directly from tape device, so it certainly stands to reason to investigate whether those medias are still usable or not.

Thanks.

[ame]

Thanks, will it be available in future versions?

regards

[veremin]

As I've said, we place a tape to Retired media pool, when a tape device claims that the said media cannot be used any longer.

Therefore, I'm not sure what functionality we should have - ability to supersede decisions done by tape vendor? Thinking about potential consequences, it sounds a bit scary, to say the least.

Thanks.

[ame]

as I have said veeam moved the tapes to the retired pool because of cleaning issues of the tape drive, so these tapes shouldn´t really be retired.....but anyway I will follow the quick and dirty workaround.

Thanks and regards

[veremin]

If tapes were claimed as retired while in reality they were not, you can open a ticket with our support team and let them double check the root cause leading to that - what in particular went wrong with cleaning. Thanks.

[DaveWatkins]

I too would like to see a way to do this. In our case the tape drive failed to detect the end markers of the tapes because it was failing. It's now been replaced but even the powershell method doesn't work claiming it's an invalid operation trying to move tapes out of the Retired Media Pool. Having to get support involved for this just seems silly, especially as the library no longer has these tapes marked as faulty anymore

[veremin]

It don't think it's silly, as for some reason tape drive incorrectly returned faulty tape status or backup server incorrectly marked those tapes as retired ones. Both of those situations are indicators of tape backup component misbehaviour which should be properly investigated by support team. Thanks!

[csydas]

Have to agree with Vlad here -- our experience with Veeam + tape is that Veeam just takes a cue from the tape hardware, and it can be a bit unclear which tapes were affected and which were actually retired. Granted, I wish there were a more clear report on the number of cycles a tape has gone through with Veeam, but at the same time, I get that this is something that should come from the library itself. I'm not even sure if such data is written to the MTF header.