64 tapes in library but unable to tell which are old and which are new

[vibe666]

i have 64 tapes in a library whivch are written to each week on a 5 week rotation and due to a snafu only some of them were erased when they are added to the library and some were not. the erased ones have all been written to so now i don't know which are new and which are last months tapes and i'm not familiar enough with arcserve to know where to look to find out.

our main guy is on holiday and i have backups pending that will need to be completed asap.

can someone please help me to dig myself out of this hole?

thanks in advance.

 

[BETuser]

Go to Quick Start. Select Device. Expand (or double click) on your tape drive on the left hand side. You should be able to see the tapes. Highlight a tape. On the right side of the screen, you should have a Summary and a Detail tab. Click on the Detail tab. You can see the information about the tape you have highlighted. Just go right down the line looking at each tape.

 

[vibe666]

thanks, but it's not showing current information there.

it gives a last formatted date, but we just erase them, which isn't listed.

also the last written to info isn't current either, not sure why. even tapes that i know for sure were onyl written to yesterday and today have a date one month old on them. i was hoping there would be a report of what tapes have been written to (or more importantly which ones haven't) in the last 7 days so i can see which ones need erasing so the backups can continue.

it might also be worth noting that this is a san master server, and many different servers write to these tapes.

 

[Cyklops]

You can use the Report Writer utility to extract information about recently written tapes.

For erased tapes this doesn't matter. ARCserve treats erased tape in exactly the same way as new tapes. They both will show up as <blank media> and have no restorable data on it.

regards

 

[vibe666]

i tried running the report, but it's still not showing up valid date data either. what i need to do is find out which tapes haven't been written to in the last 7 days so i can erase them so the jobs can continue.

thanks for the help though, i'm sure i'll get there one way or another. just hopefully before i get the sack. (

 

[Cyklops]

As I understand correctly you want to find out which <blank media> (ie. erased tapes) have been written to in the last 7 days and which are not, am I right?
If so, don't bother, erased tapes are completely empty for any backup application and contain no restorable data.

regards

 

[davidmichel]

Device Manager Window
upper right panel that shows the tapes,
right click View Report
right click View Show Grid

 

[vibe666]

the problem turned out to be that despite arcserve reporting a sucessful erase, it wasn't actually erasing any tapes.

we managed to find someone with a little more arcserve experience to take a look and he sorted it all out.

 

[vibe666]

thanks for trying to help tho, it's appreciated as always.