Tape inventory'ing issue (feature request?)

[brf]

Hi, I've run into a fairly annoying issue with the tape inventory function in Veeam, in a non-barcoded environment. When trying to inventory tapes that were last used by different backup software (Arcserve in our case), Veeam reports a failure inventory'ing that slot with the error, "Unknown media (possibly in use by another application)". No big deal so far, that's about what I'd expect. However, instead of now marking that slot as an "Unrecognized" tape (which is what every other tape backup software I've ever used would do), Veeam just pretends it never saw anything and still leaves that slot flagged as containing whatever tape was there previously.

The result of this is: when trying to swap Veeam-written tapes en masse with, say, old Arcserve tapes, there's no way to inform Veeam that the Veeam tapes are no longer there. And then when you end up erasing those tapes (to make them usable for Veeam), Veeam thinks you erased the Veeam tapes that used to be in those slots, and updates its DB accordingly...despite the fact you really didn't.

Only workaround (besides implementing barcoding) that I've found so far requires a lot of extra wasted time: instead of swapping Veeam tapes with the old Arcserve tapes, I'd have to remove the Veeam tapes, leave the slots in the magazine empty, let the library run its inventory, let Veeam see that the slots are empty, then put in the next tapes, let the library run its inventory again, etc. Now Veeam has them marked as Unrecognized.

This issue has been reproduced/confirmed (case 02413215), but I've been told Veeam doesn't consider it a bug, but rather a feature request, and that it's most appropriate to post in the forums about it. Thanks for reading.

[veremin]

Just out of curiosity - any particular reason not to use barcodes?

[brf]

Just that with the way we use our tapes, there's been no benefit to us in doing so, up until now when we switched to Veeam and saw this issue. We may go ahead and start using them at this point because of this, still deciding.

I'm not sure if Veeam supports any libraries that don't have barcode readers (or where it's an optional addon), but if it does, then this would be a fairly major issue with those.