Tape - Wrong Media Label

[TecScott]

What am I missing with the setup?

We've got a single tape drive which multiple tapes used throughout the week.

On the first occurrence, they work without any issue, however when they next run they determine the tapes the wrong label:

Checking for media 'Tuesday' in drive 'LTO8'
wrong media label Tuesday (some-guid)
Please insert media 'Tuesday' into drive 'LTO8'

The media pool allocation is set to always, retention set to overwrite and backup job set to eject media.

What I want to happen is that the second run overwrites the first tape and writes the subsequent backup to it, then the week after it repeats, etc.

 

[dcsapak]

can you post the complete task log and the output of the following commands:

proxmox-tape media list --output-format json-pretty
proxmox-tape pool list

 

[TecScott]

Thanks - Just an FYI, there's currently a backup running on tape labeled Tuesday (after formating and re-labeling I'm able to run the job that was supposed to run this morning).

Pool list:

-

Media list:

[
-
]

What we would previously do is have a Mon-Thurs, enter the tape once a week and it would run on that tape, eject the tape and we'd continue with the next night, etc. (on Veeam).

However with PBS, it seems once it's written to the tape once then it struggles to use the tape the second week and shows wrong media label and asks to insert the tape with the same label into the drive. I would have thought that always allocation policy and overwrite retention policy would have allowed the tape to be re-written on the second use?

 

[dcsapak]

mhmm can you also post the complete task log of the failed backup?
generally overwriting should work fine (it does here)

but since it seems you want to have a 'weekday' scheme, there is a better way to define the media pools to get that, see https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/tape-backup.html#weekday-scheme

 

[TecScott]

See example of last nights job which I cancelled at 7:50AM today so I could reformat/relabel tape:

-

So it does seem to detect it as writable, but then thinks the media is wrong?

 

[dcsapak]

mhm.. i'll have to check if i can reproduce that...

 

[TecScott]

Thanks - I would expect the tape to be marked as writable/empty when the job starts (as media pool allocation is set to always), where as it doesn't seem to be doing that and I assume because it's marked as full/expired it then does nothing?

 

[dcsapak]

ah now i see it... you have multiple tapes with the label 'Tuesday' and it expects the other one...
i'd recommend not having the same label on multiple drives ...

 

[TecScott]

There is only one tape with a label for each day (physically) - so one Monday, one Tuesday, one Wednesday, one Thursday.

The second tape that's been created was only created when the job run (from what I can understand), and has created a new tape with the same label but different UUID. I'm not sure why it's done that?

 

[dcsapak]

The second tape that's been created was only created when the job run (from what I can understand), and has created a new tape with the same label but different UUID. I'm not sure why it's done that?

no, the backup job will not label the tapes, that must be done beforehand
and the output:

[
  {
    "catalog": true,
    "ctime": 1668584453,
    "expired": true,
    "label-text": "Tuesday",
    "location": "offline",
    "media-set-ctime": 1670972468,
    "media-set-name": "Tue Dec 13 23:01:08 2022",
    "media-set-uuid": "45d33139-77f8-414c-8a60-c23fc072854b",
    "pool": "Daily",
    "seq-nr": 0,
    "status": "full",
    "uuid": "058fad51-c0ea-4d28-a0c1-c2669f5fbf57"
  },
...
  {
    "catalog": true,
    "ctime": 1671005111,
    "expired": true,
    "label-text": "Tuesday",
    "location": "offline",
    "media-set-ctime": 1671007541,
    "media-set-name": "Wed Dec 14 08:45:41 2022",
    "media-set-uuid": "b413a9d4-46b1-469c-a8d5-70d52597ebae",
    "pool": "Daily",
    "seq-nr": 0,
    "status": "full",
    "uuid": "a460df89-5c90-4888-98a9-a2457386f830"
  },
]

clearly shows two different tapes with the 'Tuesday' label-text

 

[TecScott]

Odd - I'm pretty sure the GUI prevents you from duplicating a label? We lost a tape and had to name the other tape 'Wednesday2' due to the fact we couldn't re-use Wednesday label until it was destroyed from proxmox-tape.

Is there a command to remove certain tapes using UUID? If I wipe it using the label it'll remove the unknown one along with the good one, so I'd rather destroy it via uuid rather than label, but from the docs it only seems to accept label for the destroy command.

I may end up just removing all current known labels and see how it goes from scratch again.

 

[dcsapak]

no, AFAIK it does not limit it, but i guess that could make sense... in the meantime i'd recommend sticking to the schema described in the examples i linked if you want to use a tape per weekday