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Managing Media
Checking the Condition of a Medium
Chapter 4132
Cartridge Memory
List
To view some additional information about Cartridge Memory enabled
media, 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
Factors
The two media condition factors you can select are:
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
Media Condition
If a device fails during backup, the media used for backup in this device
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.