Moving tapes from one drive to another still not possible

[mkretzer]

Hello,

Case # 01873716

we use the Veeam tape function from day one and were very happy about the new GFS pool feature in 9. All our tape backups use GFS pool now.
Last week, for the first time we replaced a tape drive - since 9 allows adding another drive to the job we thought we could just take the old tapes and put it in the new drive.

Sadly, the tapes were not recognize just by barcode. We had to inventory every tape. This in unacceptable! Our monthly and yearly tapes are off-site and we cannot get all these tapes back to inventory them. If we do not and delete the old drive from the console we will loose all the tape information.

This also means if we get the same drive twice for paralell processing we have to know exactly which tapes go in which drive.

I simply do not see the sense in "binding" a tape to a tape drive - in our old solution (HP DataProtector) we could just take any tape and put it in any library and it was recognized immediately.

Markus

[pkelly_sts]

That's not ideal :-/

Can I also add to this that handling of supposed "duplicate" tapes is not very intelligent, again, if you move a tape to another library, it defaults to assuming it's a duplicate barcode, rather than that you'd just moved it, again requiring an inventory to confirm that it is indeed the same tape.

[Dima P.]

Hi,

Sadly, the tapes were not recognize just by barcode. We had to inventory every tape.

Not sure I got this case right. You changed the drive – that’s ok. Previously written tape media should remain within the same media pool, while the device can be just re assigned to the media pool. Can you elaborate why you have to re inventory written media again?

[mkretzer]

Hello Dima,

why i have to do this i do not know - it makes no sense that it is implemented like this.

But if we do not re-inventory the tapes are just not recognized. You can look at the case it was verified by Veeam support that it works as expected. Which is bad.

Markus

[pkelly_sts]

Likewise, as I mentined above (sorry if not clear) I have two tape servers/libraries on different sites but linked to a single B&R server.

From memory:

If I take a tape out of one site library & move it to the other, the first thing that happens is that I get a "duplicate barcode" warning on the next rescan of the tape server.

If I then try to restore any data from that tape via the "new" library, Veeam still refers to the original location & effectively waits for the tape there as it still thinks the tape must be in the original library.

It's only after I Inventory the tape that it seems to realise that the tape is actually available but via a different library, and will then look to the correct library for the tape to restore from.

[mkretzer]

... can someone from Veeam clearify what the thinking behind all of this is? Barcode does not make so much sense as soon as you have two libraries you have to do a inventory anyway.

Can someone log an enhancement request? Will it get better with 9.5?

[Dima P.]

Thanks. Inventory is required to read the metadata from tape media to confirm that this media was actually written by VBR and still contains the data stored in VBR’s catalogue (to make sure that data was not erased/damaged etc). Count it as a onetime operation when you are going to write or read from the needed media.

I am sorry but I still can’t get why you have to inventory every media including stored offsite. Expiration dates, barcodes and file catalogue remains in VBR, so it’s possible to identify when tape is expired or what tape is required to perform a recovery, so inventory for the offsite media is not required after drive replacement.

[mkretzer]

If someone deletes the offline library all information is gone, correct? And if we have had several libraries it will be a huge mess after some time...

Why is it more likely that the data on the tape changed when you use another tape drive? Sorry i simply can not understand Veeam tape logic sometimes. I have worked with other solutions and Veeam really has strange ideas when it comes to tapes... I am a big fan of Veeam but the logic behind some of the tape decisions i cannot understand....

Can you tell me one benefit of binding barcodes/tapes to libraries?

If you have non-unique barcodes in your environment you have big problems anyway...