General BE7.3 question

[Guest_imported]

I've inherited the job of maintaining an Exchange/File Server at a company who was unsatisfied with their previous IT contractor. I have no experience with this application and there is no documentation around. After reviewing the logs I saw where there were gaps in the backups. In most cases the backups were aborted for some reason. Backups are "supposed" to take place Mon-Fri as 11:59PM with the tapes being changed daily. Unfornately this did not always happen and sometimes the tape was not changed for days at a time. The items being backed up are Exchange Directory, Informatin Store, Mailboxes and user shares on another drive. Is there any way of determining which tapes retains the first full backup? Is there any way for me to see how much tape is left to do backups on any of the them? If I understand things right, the backups are supposed to append and overwrite if there is nothing to append to. But if there is still room on the tape, the backup begins and if it runs out of room, the tape is ejected and an "mount error" results right? Or would it be best to start all over again and make sure the client keeps up with a steady backup schedule?

 

[bobafet]

Hi jamdar3,

First of all you need to understand what an inventory is and how to use it. Every time you change a tape you need to run it. In the devices tab of Backup Exec, right click your tape device and select inventory. This will run a job which will read the tape header and tell Backup Exec what is in the drive. On the right side you should now see the label of the tape.
In Restore selections you can change the Volume view to media view by right clicking all volumes and select media view. This will list all the tapes and display the contents of the tape when you drill down under the tape.
You can see how much was backed up to the tape by looking at the job log (activity log for 8.6).

The mount error can be caused by not performing an inventory.
Append and overwrite depends on what is selected in the job definition.

The manual, downloads and patches can be found at

http://www.support.veritas.com/

- select patches and updates, Backup Exec for NT/2000.

You can also see what version and revision you have in Help/About of Backup Exec - This helps knowing for the downloads mentioned above.

Bobafet