Tape drive cleaning

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

If I have performed a cleaning of a tape drive in the library by manually moving a cleaning cassette to the drive, is there any way to tell B&R that the drive has been cleaned?
Because if not, I am sure that B&R will needlessly initiate a cleaning during the next tape job.

Kind regards,
PJ

[david.domask]

Hi Per,

Veeam will initiate a cleaning cycle only if the option for Automatic Drive cleaning is enabled AND the tape drive sends the appropriate alert. Your Library will need to be set to allow backup applications to handle the cleaning* as well.

If these conditions are not met and you prefer to handle the drive cleaning on your own or with the tape hardware's own schedule, simply disable the Automatic Cleaning in the library options and no cleaning sessions will be initiated.

* this is handled differently by each vendor I've worked with, so needs to be checked in vendor documentation on how to configure for self-cleaning

[perjonsson1960]

The alert was sent to B&R during the previous tape job, so B&R probably believes that cleaning should be done.
So there is no way to "tell" B&R that the cleaning has already been done for that particular drive?

This is not a big problem. The reason for doing the manual cleaning was that I wasn't sure if the cassette was depleted or not, and wanted to try it.

[david.domask]

Correct, Veeam itself doesn't check anything except for the alerts returned by the tape hardware itself. That alert is the only trigger for the cleaning, so very likely if you saw the message in the Veeam UI after a cleaning, it's possible that the tape hardware was simply returning the most recent alerts which perhaps hadn't been cleared.

If I got the sequence right here, you

1. Ran a Tape job, got the cleaning alert
2. Manually cleaned the drive outside of Veeam
3. Are curious what happens on the next run

In this case, assuming no alerts are returned by the library, Veeam will do "nothing" as it should in this case.

But unless the automatic cleaning is enabled and a tape alert is sent, the cleaning will not be started by Veeam.

[perjonsson1960]

Correct. The automatic cleaning is indeed enabled in B&R, and I got the alert.
So, I guess this means that the cleaning will be done again?

[david.domask]

Just to confirm, you mean you already tested after getting the previous alert and it alerted again on the 2nd job run?

The cleaning should only be triggered if the drive is sending the appropriate alert. There's a check during the drive assignment process to check for drives that are alerting they need cleaning, and that check will determine if the cleaning is launched.

[perjonsson1960]

Okay, I see. So B&R asks the drives if they need cleaning, before the actual backup is launched?

No, I haven't started the tape job again, I have only received the alert during the previous run, and after that I did the manual cleaning of one of the drives from the library.
The tape jobs are only run once a month, so it will be three weeks or so until they run again.