The following items are NetBackup media management best practices:

• Use the robot inventory update operation for media management.

• Use a scratch pool for unassigned media.

• Configure cleaning cartridges for tape drives and use TapeAlert for automatic drive cleaning if the drives support automatic cleaning.

• Replace old media according to the life-span recommendations of the manufacturer. Replace old cleaning media also.

• Use the robotic libraries that have a bar code reader and use only the bar code labels that the robot vendor recommends.

• Use bar code rules for media type assignment when you inventory multimedia libraries. Use bar code naming conventions to differentiate between data and cleaning tapes and different physical media types. A common convention is a prefix that identifies the type of media.

• Before performing inject or eject commands, ensure that the media access port is empty. Although NetBackup can handle a port that is not empty, some libraries can have problems.