How to avoid creating duplicate volume labels?

Thanks for your reply.

I'm talking about forced label action and not automatic process.

I'm talking about human mistake of writing a label on volume, while there is another volume with the same name.

you right regarding the eligibility of recycling. non-eligible recycling volume will not write the label.

-mati

You can't fight stupidity of humans - you can only fire them off.  If you force something than it is obvious you are forcing something and you are on your own.  I believe bingo already addressed what happens in such cases, but if one does something wrong then there will never never guarantee that outcome won't be wrong either.

NetWorker will label volume ONLY if volume is eligible for recycling. Volume is eligible for recycling when all save sets and depend save sets on it (elsewhere) have retention passed.

You may have auto media management enabled, which enabled NetWorker to use unknown/new/unlabelel tapes which potentially may lead in use of existing volume that shouldn't be used if data about volume has been removed from database. By default this feature is disabled (meaning you must have enable it if this is enabled at your site).

???? This should not be possible as this would be against one of NetWorker's fundamental rules!

NW in fact will not allow you to use the same label twice - it will give you a clear error message.

However, in the old times (before NW 7?) NW allowed the same label to exist more than once.

Such might have happened when you scanned another tape with the same label but from another data zone (NW server).

The VOLID was the differentiator here.

Some years ago, i noticed that this feature did not work any more. However, i have not tested it since.

I don’t believe that even if force label manually is used that NetWorker should produce a duplicate name for a volume?

Are you 100% certain there is no difference between the names?

Did you check the volid of the two volumes?

If you have not already done so I would open an SR with EMC Support for assistance.

Regards,

Bill Mason

yes, it creates the same existing label.

volid you mean the tape label, or there is a CLI command to find it?

You can use mminfo –q volume= -r name,volid,pool,type

This should tell you if they are the same or not.

Regards,

Bill Mason

.. and while on the subject, are you shifting barcodes?  Or you don't use barcodes at all?

thanks Bill.

Yes, I'm using barcodes. the barcode is identical to the label.

Mati