How to allocate tapes from a spare pool when a pool is full?

Morning,

To use a scratch pool approach to allow tapes to "move" from pool to pool as needed by NetWorker, requires a couple of steps -

1) Create a group and pool called something like "SCRATCH"

2) Set pool configuration to allow media to recycle to other pools

3) Set other pool's configuration to allow media to recycle from other pools

4) label a number of tapes in to the SCRATCH pool

5) Before media will "move" from the SCRATCH pool to the other pools you need to set the media to a recycled state. This can be done from either the GUI or from the command line. I prefer to do this from the command line.

Steps 4 and 5 can be performed using these two commands -

nsrjb ¿L ¿b SCRATCH ¿S low-high
nsrjb ¿o recyclable ¿S low-high -Y

Be careful when using the -Y option as this will mark all tapes in the slot range low-high as recyclable regardless of contents.

Hope this helps

IKP

And what about setting Networker to Auto Media Management and just put some blank tapes? If he wants a spare pool to be used only to recycle tapes to other pools, I don't see why he cannot just use blank tapes without any label.

Wonderful! That helped.

The option to give the free tape the 'recyclable' mark did the trick. I skipped it before not knowing this is necessary.

Thanks.