Hi all,

We have a centralized backup system of several dozen machines. My boss
is cracking down on tape costs, so we are trying to come up with a
strategy to recycle old backup tapes. The problem is that it's not
easy to do it because the backup software (Time Navigator) writes
files from different machines and from different dates onto the same
tape. Thus, if I want to keep a full backup only of a certain subset
of machines from a year ago, it's very time-consuming to track down
the tapes involved.

Obviously, the software allows to backup each host to a different set
of tapes, but managing all this becomes hard very quickly, and it
would waste tapes anyway. I can also set cut-off dates where I close
all tapes and start anew, say, each month, but this also adds to the
management time and tape wastage.

Has anyone run into this problem (ease-of-use vs precise
accountability) with backup tapes, especially regarding tape reuse?
This would probably arise with any kind of centralized backup
solution...

Thanks,
Simon Ilyushchenko