Comments on: Automatically wipe the backup tape before a job runs

By: The Most-Watched IT Questions: January 4, 2011 - ITKE Community Blog

The Most-Watched IT Questions: January 4, 2011 - ITKE Community Blog — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:42:44 +0000

[...] 9. Aguacer0, Davidmichel, and Stevesz give some feedback on a member looking to automatically wipe the backup tape before a job runs. [...]

By: stevesz

stevesz — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:02:42 +0000

It sounds like the backup jobs are set to append rather than overwrite. If you use an append option, it will continue to add backups until the media is full. If you tell the job to overwrite, it will overwrite what is already on the media with the new data.

You do not mention what you are using for software to perform your backups. the terminology of setting this up does vary some from one piece of software to another.

I have one server here that we run a full backup, and then several incremental backups. the last incremental is set to eject the tape when done. Where tape is being used, we normally set it up to eject the tape at the end of the job. It is a visual clue that the tape needs to be changed, and that work already saved it not overwritten before its time.

By: davidmichel

davidmichel — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:50:06 +0000

Most just use the Overwrite option to let the job overwrite the tape automatically.

However if you really want to erase the tape prior to the job you can use either ca_devmgr -erase or ca_devmgr -cherase, depending on if it is a stand alone driver or a library. This can be run either via the Job Scheduler Wizard or as a Pre command added to the job.

By: The Most-Watched IT Questions: October 26, 2010 - ITKE Community Blog

The Most-Watched IT Questions: October 26, 2010 - ITKE Community Blog — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:19:04 +0000

[...] 1. Aguacer0 took a swing at one user’s question about automatically wiping the backup tape for a Windows Server 2003 job runs. [...]