About alternate media types

Alternate media types let you define more than one type of tape in the same library. You can use the alternate types to differentiate between different physical cartridges.

The following are examples of alternate media types:

8MM, 8MM2, 8MM3
DLT, DLT2, DLT3
HCART, HCART2, HCART3

For example, if a robot has DLT4000 and DLT7000 drives, you can specify the following media types:

DLT media type for the DLT4000 tapes
DLT2 media type for the DLT7000 tapes

NetBackup then does not load a tape that was written in a DLT4000 drive into a DLT7000 drive and vice versa.

You must use the appropriate default media type when you configure the drives. (When you configure drives in NetBackup, you specify the default media type to use in each drive type.)

In a robot, all of the volumes (of a specific vendor media type) must be the same NetBackup media type. For example, for a TLH robot that contains 3490E media, you can assign either NetBackup HCART, HCART2, or HCART3 media type to that media. You cannot assign HCART to some of the media and HCART2 (or HCART3) to other of the media.