Hello, Jobs back up normally, bu

[Sylva]

Hello,

Jobs back up normally, but when at tape 4, in stead of backing up to tape 5, ARCserve goes back to tape 1. I looked at the jobs, but there's no single tape ever flagged for a particular job. Destination for all is * in Backup Mgr's Media field.

Went into the Device Mgr., where I saw the following:

1. Tape 2, 3 & 4 have the same ID, but different sequence number.
2. Tape 1, 5, 6 & 7 have the same sequence number, but different ID.

May it be that because of tape 5,6 & 7th same sequence number ARCserve goes back to tape 1, and not forward to tape 5? But 5 has a different ID.

Anyone's opinion welcome, and thanks for any input.

John

 

[jabus]

How do you have your job defined? Is the Destination '*'? Do you have it set to append instead of overwrite?

 

[Sylva]

Yes and Yes. However, my boss discovered that sequence numbers were not the same on all of the 7 tapes. I formatted the batch two times. All should have been the same number, since rotation is not used, with different IDs. I still don't know what was the difference between my formatting to his formatting the same tapes which are a completely new batch, freshly out of the package.

Tanks,
John

 

[fritz4000]

It appears to me that tapes 2, 3 & 4 are part of the same backup jog. The identifier is the random id. If the tape needs to span, the next tape will have the same random ID but an increased sequence number. The remaining tapes appear to have separate random ID's due to the manual formatting that you performed.

Is any one backup job spanning more than three tapes?

If not, everything appears to be functioning normally. ARCserve only works with the changer/library in "random" mode, not sequential. Therefore, tapes will not be selected 5 to 6 and then 6 to 7. Any tape in the group (as long as it is not part of a media pool or a different job) can be used. It is a problem if tapes are being overwritten thar are in the save set of the media pool, or if for sequence 4 is actually overwriting sequence 1.

 

[Sylva]

Thanks. No, all of the backup jobs should be spanning about one and one half tape. I have a simple setup, no library, no rotation, just want to see how the software behaves when sequentially has to go from one tape to the other until reaching the end of the seventh. That's all.

When I am looking at the tapes in the device manager, truely enough, all tapes have the sequencial number 1, but the IDs are different, which I suppose, is the way for them to be. However, these ID numbers are not in increasing or decreasing order, but random, in other words if the first tape has 3 as its ID, the second tape does not necessarily have a 4, but it can have a 2 or 5. Then, how does the software know which tape is next? How does it know that after the first tape it has to go to the second, then to the third, and so on, untill it reaches the 7th. I don't want it to go back to the first tape after already recording it, as it shouldn't since Options are configured to Append, not Overwrite.

John

 

[fritz4000]

Append is only available as the first media selection. For spanned media, ARCserve looks at the options for Additional Backup Media. Here you have two choices. The first is to Overwrite same media name (if the same random ID and increased sequence # already exists) or blank media. The second is to Overwrite the same media name, blank media or any media, which means we will create the next sequence out of whatever tape you put in the drive.

There is not much use to formatting a tape prior to letting ARCserve use it.