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rreed
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Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as free

Post by rreed »

Afternoon, I had had dabbled in v8's tape functionality, crudely on my part, pretty much by just manually copying .vbk's to tape as I got time to get to it. Our v9 upgrade was a fresh install, migrating everything over. Looking very forward to much improved scheduling (GFS!) to take care of this the right way.

Anyways, I removed/uninstalled our v8 physical tape server, added it to our v9 B&R, it found the tapes, and imported them. Fine. But they're in the Imported media pool. I want to move them to some newly created pools but every time I try I get "Mark selected tapes as as free, and move them to the selected media pool?" No, I don't want to mark it as free, but I do want to move it to the selected media pool and continue where I left off w/ my old setup. I realize Veeam warns us that "When you move a tape to any media pool, Veeam Backup & Replication marks this tape as free."

But why? I have space on my tapes, I simply want to pick up where I left off, etc. Why can't I simply move a tape from one media pool to another w/o marking it as free?
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Dima P.
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by Dima P. »

Hi rreed,

Indeed, there is a limitation that written tape can be a part of only one media pool, so once the media pool is deleted (which happened after reinstallation of the VBR server) such tape can be used only for recovery. You can manually erase such tape (or mark as free) when the retention comes.

May I ask why you decided to go for clean install instead of the upgrade? (in case of upgrade media pools and started tapes are kept safe, thus can be used further)
rreed
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by rreed » 1 person likes this post

Thanks Dima. Any chance this can get removed/corrected in an up-coming release? Any workaround besides restoring this data to temp storage and re-backing up to tape? For our tapes that are full that's fine, but we have quite a few that were only around 1/4 - 1/3 full. That has us shelving quite a bit of money's worth of LTO-6 tapes for a year.

My general practice is never do an in-place full version upgrade of anything, especially when it's pretty hot off the press. We only rolled our v9 to help trouble shoot some long standing issues w/ our v8 setup, that were since ferreted out as not likely a direct fault of v8. And we found many of v9's new features worth proceeding for, despite being a very recent release. Otherwise we would have waited to see if any show-stopping issues popped up before proceeding, but still as a fresh install.
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rreed
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by rreed »

So apparently I can't move my imported tapes to a vault either?
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by veremin »

Only offline tapes can be moved to vault. And imported tapes are present in online state. Thanks.
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by Dima P. »

Any chance this can get removed/corrected in an up-coming release?
Thank you for sharing your case. I promise we will think about it but there is indeed no elegant (except rewriting such tapes) workaround in the current version.
rreed
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by rreed »

Hi guys, any chance this was fixed in v9u1 please?
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by veremin »

What issue in particular are you talking about? Moving written tapes between existing media pools? Thanks.
rreed
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by rreed »

Yes please, we would like to be able to move existing tapes b/t existing (or even newly created) media pools w/o Veeam wanting to mark it as free. Just move the tape to another pool and continue on please. While we're at it, be able to continue writing to an imported tape as well please rather than it becoming R/O.
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by veremin »

Just move the tape to another pool and continue on please.
It looks easy on the surface, but if go deep into details, we will see there many unknown variables.

Say, while moving media to a different media pool should only one media or the whole media set be moved, should a media inherit retention settings from a new media pool, if it should, than it should become a part of one of media sets existing in new media pool, as retention setting apply to media sets, rather than to individual tape
While we're at it, be able to continue writing to an imported tape as well please rather than it becoming R/O.
I'm not sure whether this will be possible. Such feature would require tape ability to host two different mediasets with different retention settings, which might be tricky.

Thanks.
rreed
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by rreed »

Resurrecting this one, because case in point I had accidentally set a backup job to the wrong media pool and discovered it this morning. Not a problem, just move the given tape from my test pool to my production pool (single tape in this instance). Can't because it wants to mark it as free and overwrite it. So now I have to purge everything on this tape to temporary storage somewhere (another separate issue about which I just posted). In the case where a given tape was part of a set, I would expect Veeam to pop up and say "This tape is part of a set, you'll need to move the entire set from old pool to new pool," which would be great and fine. Pool settings, makes sense to me it would inherit the new pool settings, otherwise I'd be leaving it in the old one.
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Re: Move a tape to any media pool, Veeam marks this tape as

Post by Dima P. »

rreed,

Thank you for sharing, noted! We are investigating how to make this possible.
timmi2704
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[MERGED] Veeam loses tape content info when changing media p

Post by timmi2704 »

Hi forum,

when moving tapes from one media pool to another, Veeam loses information about tape content.
Is there any explanation available for that behaviour? What is the idea behind that?
And most importantly: Is there any way to avoid that? :)

Please find more information in SR 01821044.
adam_c
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Re: Veeam loses tape content info when changing media pool

Post by adam_c »

Hello Timo,

This is purely current design. Though I'm not 100% certain of the "why". Perhaps our PMs can provide that insight :). But the Protect feature was implemented to help obtain the longer storage goals when needing to extend past the retention setting of the Media Pool.

After reviewing your case and seeing what your use-case was, the Protect option could be a much more convenient option as compared to moving the tapes and re-cataloging them. Instead of those steps you can simply select the Tape(s) you wish to extend retention and click "Protect" and they will be protected until you choose to remove that protection.

Here is a little more info on the Protect Feature: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... tapes.html
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