Database Maintainance Plan question

[techspl]

I created a DMP for all my databases to be backed up to a tape device (Ultrium1 LTO). However, I keep getting this error on while backing up some of the databases "The file on device '\\.\Tape0' is not a valid Microsoft Tape Format backup set". The strange thing about it is that it is not consistent. If on Monday, database X backs up successfully, on Tuesday it fails with this error and vice versa. My transactions which are backing up to my hard disk is OK. I temporarily change my database plan to backup to hard disk and I'm not getting any errors. what can be causing this?

 

[tlbroadbent]

I can only guess because we do all backups to disk and then copy the backup files to tape rather than backing up SQL Server to tape. We find it is is faster and easier to do this.

Perhaps another process has written to the tape and overwritten the device format. Maybe the tape is corrupted.

Have you searched the MS knowledgebase?
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http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q124023

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By the way, which version of SQL Server are you using? There seem to be a lot of entries in the KB for SQL 6.5 and tape backups. Terry L. Broadbent - DBA
Computing Links:

http://tlbroadbent.home.attbi.com/prog.htm

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