Our particular tape drive inventories tapes based on barcode. Until it's done inventorying new tapes, it registers in BE as "Robotic door open" and we can't run a scan to update the tape inventory in BE.
We're a smaller shop and there's always something to get distracted by, which has led to backups failing a few times. BE thinks there's no tapes, but it never tries to scan the drive. Is there a way to enable "if you're out of tapes, make sure" or at least schedule a scan every day at a certain time or something?
I've used the following method in BE 12.5 and 2010 (and maybe earlier, I don't remember that far back): Shift-select all the slots in the library or drive, right click them, select Inventory, select the Schedule option in the left pane, select the "Run according to schedule" option, select a day\time prior to the beginning of your day's or week's backups, click the submit button. This will create a scheduled Inventory job, set to run on the day\time you scheduled.
If you swap tapes every day then schedule this for once a day, if you swap tapes once a week then schedule this for once a week, etc., etc.
For instance, we swap tapes once a week on Friday mornings. Our weekly backup cycle starts on Saturday mornings. I have this Inventory job scheduled to run every Friday night at 11PM.
As of version 10d at least, there was no way to schedule this. Because of this, we had to have "Scan barcodes" as part of our tape-change-day procedures. In our case, it would return the OLD bar-codes if the library hadn't gotten finished inventorying all the new tapes.