Managing Media

Checking the Condition of a Medium

Cartridge Memory To view some additional information about Cartridge Memory enabled

Listmedia, you can use the Cartridge Memory List feature. This lets you view the contents of Cartridge Memory for the medium.

Information stored in the IDB is not related to the information stored in the Cartridge Memory.

Factors Influencing the Condition of Media

Data Protector uses media condition factors to calculate the condition of the media. The condition of the media in a media pool determines the condition of the media pool. For example, as soon as one medium in a pool is poor, the whole media pool is poor. When media that are in poor condition are removed from the pool, the pool status reverts to either fair or good status.

The condition of a media pool indicates the reliability of that media pool for backups. For example, a backup to old or worn media is more likely to have read/write errors.

Media Condition The two media condition factors you can select are:

Factors

Medium valid for. The age of a medium is calculated as the number of months that have elapsed since the medium was formatted. Once a medium is older than the threshold number of months, it is marked as poor. The default threshold is 36 months.

Maximum number of overwrites. The usage of a medium is defined as the number of overwrites at the beginning of the medium. Once the medium has more than the threshold number of overwrites, it is marked as poor. The default threshold is 250 overwrites, except for DDS, which is set up with a default of 100 overwrites.

Device Error and If a device fails during backup, the media used for backup in this device Media Condition are marked as poor. This prevents future errors if the problem was

caused by the bad media.

If this error was due to a dirty drive, clean the drive and verify the medium to reset its condition.

It is recommended that you investigate if media marked poor appear in a pool. You can use Verify to get more information on each medium’s condition. It is not recommended to simply recycle the medium.

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HP B6960-90078 manual Factors Influencing the Condition of Media, 132