Parallel tape processing and media sets

[Manny15]

Hello,

We're having issues with media sets. We have 4 tapes for our weekly backups. Full backups run on Friday and incrementals the rest of the week. We configured the media pool to create a new media set on Fridays. I understand that Veeam will create a media set per drive, so this effectively splits our tapes in to two media sets. So today, we had 3 tapes on media set #1 and 1 tape on media set #2. When the backup job ran it selected the tape in media set #2. When that tape got full, it asked to insert a tape. The tapes that are on media Set #1 have plenty of space available. One of those tapes has 1.4TB of free space. That particular job is only backing up about 100GB of incremental data. Now I have to insert a new tape to allow the backup to continue. It's basically wasting a tape (in media set #1) that is nearly empty. Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!
Manny

[Manny15]

OK, I have a ticket open with Veeam Support, but am not getting anywhere....here's the latest response:

If the media pool is set to use both tape drives, then a separate media set will be created for each drive. When a new media set is created, Veeam will need to use a new tape instead of appending to an existing tape; therefore, Veeam won't be able to "share" tapes between the two drives.

[Manny15]

Update -

We ended up using just 1 of our 2 tape drives for the tape backup jobs. Not an ideal solution since backup jobs take a little longer now... but we are no longer getting split media sets.

[veremin]

A question about parallel processing always comes down to a trade off between job speed and space left on tapes. In your case, wasted space seems to be the biggest concern, so turning parallel processing off is a way to go, indeed. Thanks.