Managing Media

Formatting Media

Formatting Media

What Is Formatting Formatting media prepares them for use with Data Protector by saving

Media?the information about the media (media IDs, description and location) in the IDB, and also writes this information on the medium itself (medium header). When you format media, you also specify to which media pool the media belong.

NOTE

Certain media management operations (initialize, scan, enter, and eject)

 

can be performed during backup or restore. Data Protector uses

 

“advisory locking” to ensure that a backup or restore will not fail if the

 

device cannot be locked. Other operations (backup, restore, import, and

 

copy) require device locking to proceed with backup or restore.

 

 

When to Format

You need to format media before the media can be used for backup. If the

Media

media are not formatted before backup and the Loose media allocation

 

policy is defined for the media pool, and the global variable

 

InitOnLoosePolicy is set to 1 (default is 0) Data Protector

 

automatically formats new media when they are selected for backup. In

 

this case, the media are labelled with default values.

 

Non-Data Protector media must be formatted before backup.

Recognition of

Data Protector recognizes common media formats, if the medium was

Other Formats

already in use. See “Recognizing Other Data Formats” on page 111 for

 

detailed information.

Formatting with

You can extend the size of the medium header and fill it up with

Padding Blocks

incompressible data, padding blocks. This becomes useful when creating

 

media copies. The padding blocks are not copied to the target medium.

 

This way you make sure that the target medium does not reach the end

 

of the tape before the source medium.

 

Tape padding is disabled by default. To enable it, set the

 

OB2BLKPADDING_n variable in the omnirc file on the system with the

 

backup device connected. For more information, see “Using Omnirc

 

Options” on page 525.

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Chapter 4

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Image 138
HP B6960-90078 manual Formatting Media