DDS3 Tape full too soon 1

[Curvykev]

Hi

I'm using Arcserve 2000 V7 Build 1086. I use a DDS tape drive and DDS 3 tapes. I back up a C, D and E drive plus registry and System state.

The total size of the backed up files is always around the 16Gb mark. Recently I started to get media requests, which according to the logs were made prior to the E: drive being backed up. On checking, I verified that E: drive had been backed up and I figured that it was a glitch of some kind but couldn't explain it. This week I've being getting the same message before the D: drive backs up. I've checked, and while the D: drive is backed up, the E: drive is not.

Nothing has changed size wise on the server and there are no obvious points of failure in the set up or execution of the job. Has anyone else had this problem?

 

[davidmichel]

First lets look at the capacity of the drive.
DDS 3 drive is listed for a capacity of 12 to 24gb.

So at anything over 12gb it could be spanning. It is possible that it was already close to capacity and now there has been an increase in the total bytes of data or in the amount of non-compressible data which is pushing the backup over to two tapes.

To see if there has been such a change, check the activity or job log for the total bytes written to tape for the job. Also check the Database Media view for the total bytes written to the sequence number one tapes.

One other thing, to check in the Database Media view. For each of the tapes look for soft write errors, they will take up space on tape. See faq478-4005 for details on soft write errors.

 

[Curvykev]

Thanks for your help David, I'll try those steps.