Hi,
we're using DPM2012, we have it on two nodes, the first backs up to disk and then offsite to the second server which goes to disk + tape.
In general tape colocation works however I have a slight issue;
At the moment we are running close to the number of tapes we actually need to backup the volume of data we back up, this means that every day I mark tapes as free using the force free tape script available on the web... This works but occasionally I notice that the script will not quite finish - DPM will take the tape before it completes and start using it as a free tape i.e. immediately starts putting data on the tape. Normally this is okay but it occasionally leaves a single bit of data on the tape.. the backup will continue and perhaps write 100 GB for example, then all of a sudden that tape is marked as 'offsite ready' when there is clearly lots of free space on the tape.
So today for example I have about 10 different PG's on a tape, all with todays date as the backup date, expiry is plus 2 weeks. But then there is a single PG on there with a date of about 2 weeks ago which I'm assuming is what has made the tape offsite ready.
I don't really want to have to stop active backups from running to be able to mark a tape as free as a fix - anyone know of a way around this?
My second question - relating to co location again - if a backup of a PG needs to span a second tape - can it only do so on a free tape? some of our larger backups will sit and refuse to write to a tape which might (by estimation) have 500 GB free space left on it.
Thanks
Chris
