Erasing media with BE v8.6 - advice please

[dellboy]

I am evaluating Veritas BE v8.6 after having real fun with CA Arcserve. I have installed the BE v8.6 on a W2K server Sp2 running Exchange 5.5 Advanced.

Whenever I load a tape, be that a 'virgin' or used tape the system reports 'bad media'. I can not seem to erase the tape, after 10 minutes I killed the job. A cleaning tape is then requested before any further backups can be attempted!
Other issues I have noticed is that ejecting the media through BE v8.6 takes 6 minutes, it takes 8 minutes to realise that it can not backup to the media as it is 'bad media', are these time scales normal?

The only suggestion veritas online support comes up with is to try and erase the tape through NTbackup - which I have tried without success - any suggestions would be appreciated on all these matters.

Cheers
Guy

 

[2ffat]

<snide remark>You mean you actually got BE to eject your tape???? That's great!</remark> It is not normal. It probably means that BE is hung on a process. This usually happens when, like you mentioned, BE can't finish its job. Somewhere I read that a full erase of a tape may take several hours.
James P. Cottingham

I am the Unknown lead by the Unknowing.
I have done so much with so little
for so long that I am now qualified
to do anything with nothing.

 

[dellboy]

Cheers for the note. I have now given up on the onboard/installed Dell tape drive and plugged in an external Quantum, installed the Veritas ADMM - or something like that - drivers and an initial test backup appears to have backed up a couple of mailboxes.

More testing to take place today.

Cheers
Guy

 

[slayer213]

We currently use Backup Exec 7.3 and I am currently evaluating 8.6. I have not seen this issue myself. I have it running on a Dell 2500 with an internal DLT drive. I have used nothing but virgin tapes in this thing. At first Backup Exec 8.6 will just indicate the drive is empty even though there is a new tape in there. I just inventory the drive and then it will mark it as blank media. After that I just label it whatever the heck I want to call it and then drag and drop it to its corresponding media set. No problems yet. Done a few backups on some problematic machines that we couldnt get the Agent Accelerator or OFO running on with 7.3 and its worked flawlessly. Also used it on some machines that we didn't have problems with and once again no issues. I did have a minor issue with the OFO and its minimum/maximum static volume settings. The new 8.6 will try and autocalculate what you need to run the OFO. When using this feature on a couple of servers it would backup the C drive fine but fail on the D drive. Perhaps this feature only works well if you are only backing up a single drive system. There are also some calculations that you will find on Veritas's crappy knowledge base. It is like your available memory divided by .04 and # of files multiplied by .005 and that will give you your minimum & maximum static volume. These give you some really wacked out numbers that have yet to work for us. Try using these calculations on a file server that has a 180GB RAID drive with a half million files on it. I don't think so. Anyway, I called Veritas and asked them about it and they said to use 2000MB as both my min. & max. with the new Backup Exec 8.6 and that should work fine, sure enough it did, but haven't tried it on the file server yet. They informed me that the documentation that recommends using those figures is an Internal Tech Note and apparently the people who don't pay for support or who are not evaluating the product get the &quot;short end of the stick&quot; on this.

Anyway, give it a try and see what it has to offer. Hopefully some of this helps you.