Some weeks ago, in an earlier Support Tip (Support Tip: Drive status in the GUI), we talked about device status and how the device icons are seen in the GUI. Now, let's look at Slots and Media.

Usually a slot will contain a tape which is also listed in the Internal Database and member of a media pool. In that case the icon of the slot will show a green tape inserted in the slot:

A similar icon will be seen for the tape in the pool:

When this medium is exported from the IDB, obviously it will be gone from the pool (no icon seen there anymore). But the tape was not ejected, so it is still seen in the slot. However, it is colored gray now to indicate it is not imported into the IDB:

When the tape is ejected from the slot, an empty slot will be all that's left:

When the tape is inserted again into the slot, but the header is not scanned, DP only knows there's a tape loaded, but has no clue about the content. Even when the barcode is still matching, it may be another tape or it may have been overwritten with some other data while it was ejected or it may have been erased. Besides, the IDB does not contain any data anymore linked to this barcode, so it is really an Unknown tape. This is represented with a question mark:

Obviously the pool is still not containing this medium as it is still unknown. When it is scanned, it will be recognized as "Data Protector foreign" because a DP header is seen and no related data is found in the IDB. Again, the gray inserted tape is seen in the library slot, without any representation in a pool (see the third picture above, after the export). As soon as the tape is imported again, it will again be represented with the green icon and it will be seen again in the pool also (see initial pictures 1 and 2 above).

So far we have checked inserted tapes, both imported and exported and we also checked the exported tape which is ejected. The combination left is the ejected tape, which is still imported into the IDB. As the slot was ejected, it will be seen as an empty slot:

But the pool will still contain this medium and it will show that it was ejected by changing the icon to a tape icon (not inserted into a slot):

We could summerize in the following table:

	INSERTED (SLOT)	INSERTED (MEDIUM / POOL)	EJECTED (SLOT)	EJECTED (MEDIUM / POOL)
IMPORTED
EXPORTED	or	X		X

And besides all this, the green color could be changing to red in case there have been any issues with the tape.

The slot:

And the medium in the pool:

You may be interested to some of my other Support Tips too: Support Tips listed per category.