Difference between Assigned media (active) and Appendable Media

HI @Federico ,

Can you check our documentation:

https://documentation.commvault.com/2022e/expert/10211_media_operations.html#mark-appendable

Best Regards,

Sebastien

Hi Sebastien

I have read that documentation… it’s not clear what is the difference

Regards

Federico

There is no difference it’s what you can do depending on the status and the option you have.

This one might be a better link actually:

https://documentation.commvault.com/2022e/expert/10397_identifying_media_icons.html

Hi Sebastien

I have read that documentation…

but if there isn’t difference why there are two different status??? “Assigned media (active) and Appendable Media”

Regards

Federico

Hi Frederico,

Let me check and confirm.

Best Regards,

Sebastien

Hi Frederico,

For media to be appendable, it has to be manually set by the user and is done on media that is marked as full or bad

Or by a setting such as Use Appendable media within n day(s) of its last write time

Assigned media is just when the tape is assigned to the library

Best Regards,

Sebastien

@Federico,

Sorry for the long delayed update to this. 

Active simply means that a tape has been assigned to a Storage Policy and there is still room to write more data on the tape. 

In other words, the tape has not yet been marked 'Full'. 

Say no more backups run. The Library may unload the drives by moving the tapes back to the slots. The Active tape is assigned to Storage Policy=TapeCopy.

If a backups runs for the same 'TapeCopy' Storage Policy, Commvault will then re-insert that Active-tape back into the drive. 

Not commonly recommended but the option to mark the tape 'Appendable' is there. This would mean that the tape was marked Full. As some jobs age off, some of the space is 'freed'. 

If there was a 4TB tape which now only has 1GB of live/active data, one may consider right-clicking and marking that tape 'Appendable'. Which then allows Commvault to potentially use that tape again. Additional steps are require and can be found here:

https://documentation.commvault.com/2023e/expert/media_operations_configuration.html.

This may be considered as an emergency like… you’re out of tapes all others are Full. 

(The recommended way is to allow 100% of all the jobs to prune. Then the tape will automatically get moved to the Scratch Pool. This would avoid the data on the tape being fragmented.) 

Hope this was more helpful. 

Ray.