General
The general information about a media, including the barcode, unique ID for the media in the CommCell, the current library, last written library, location in the library (slot number, or if mounted on a drive, the drive number), export location if the media is exported, the previous export location if the media was previously exported, the storage policy and storage policy copy accessing the media, the stream number (of the storage policy) that was used to write to the media and the CommCell ID are displayed.
The general information about a media can be viewed from the General tab of the Media Properties dialog box.
Media
Information
The general information about a media, including the recording format, the media type, discovery date and time, whether the media is required for auxiliary Copy, whether the media is appendable or not, export date and time (if exported), and the condition of the media and the data and time on which it was marked as prevent export, if the media was marked as prevent export is displayed.
The media information can be viewed from the Media Info tab of the Media Properties dialog box.
See View the Condition of a Media for step-by-instructions.
Media Properties (Unique ID)
The media information about a media, including information about the amount of data stored in the media and the usage information. The usage information is used to compare against the thresholds established for the media.
Information about the specific media can be viewed from tab that displays the unique ID of the media in the Media Properties dialog box. For optical media, two tabs representing the sides of the media the will be displayed. You can also view information on the data available in the media by clicking the Show Data Information button.
Status
The media is cycled through the following stages:
- When new media is imported and discovered in a library, it is assigned to a scratch pool.
- When a job requires a media, a media is logically reassigned to the Assigned Media pool.
- Subsequent jobs write data into the media until it is full. At this point, although the media cannot be written to, it remains in the Assigned Media pool, available for restore operations.
- When all of the data on the media exceeds its retention criteria and is pruned, the system returns the media to a scratch pool for reuse.
- Occasionally, a job may encounter hardware or software errors while attempting to write to or read from a media. In these cases, the system may mark the affected media as BAD so that the problem can be diagnosed and, if possible, fixed. (For additional information on scratch pools, see Master Drive Pools, Drive Pools and Drives.)
Status information about individual media is provided in the CommCell Console. Note that if a media is double-sided (e.g., an optical disk), each side has its own status. The table that follows lists the various media status with a brief description of each status:
| Active | The media is available for writing. In other words, when data is sent to the storage policy copy associated with the media group containing this media, the data is written to this media. |
| Full | The MediaAgent can no longer write to this media, either because it contains no free space or because the media has been marked as full, either by the user or by the MediaAgent. The MediaAgent will mark a media full if it is unavailable for a data protection operation. However, the media will remain in the Assigned Media pool as it contains un-pruned data. (See Mark a Media Full for step-by-step instructions on marking media volumes full, .) |
| Idle | This media belongs to a scratch pool rather than to the Assigned Media pool. New media should have Idle status after they are imported and discovered. |
| Read Only | The MediaAgent may mark a media as Read Only when an error is encountered while attempting to write to the media. Although data cannot be written to a Read Only media, it will be possible to restore data from the media. |
| Bad | The MediaAgent can no longer read from nor write to this media. Media with Bad status will be moved to the Retired Media pool after it is recycled. |
| Appendable | An Appendable media typically has room left
on it. The MediaAgent can write to this media, if the Mark Media
Appendable option and
Use Appendable Media for (n) Days option are enabled in the
Media tab of Library Properties.
(For more information on this option, see
Library Properties.) Media is marked as Appendable in the following situations:
|