How do you guys deal with bad tapes?

[bchung]

I was wondering how you guys are dealing with bad tape media. We backup to a magnetic device and have a main aux copy to tape of weekly fulls. I've run into a lot of tapes going bad. If there is a bad tape, I have a policy that is an aux copy of manually select fulls. I select the fulls and backup all the data again. Do you guys deal with it that way?


I've talked a lot to CV. The solution seems to be creating more Policies. This past week our manually select fulls failed. I was not able to do a "Select to Copy" on the manually select fulls. CV told me the only option is to create another policy. Luckily, I have been keeping screenshots of which policy ran which week.

 

[bchung]

With all of this comes more problems if one has extended retention rules, creating multiple end of month fulls.

 

[mybackupfailed]

Are the tapes really bad to the point you cannot read from them? Or does the library complain about them but Commvault has no problems with them?

When this happens to me the tapes can still be read from. So I find the storage policy name and view the jobs on this bad tape. Then I create a selective copy and pick the FULL backup jobs as content and run an AUX copy. Jobs are copied from the bad tape to another tape in another storage policy copy. The limitation is this is FULL ONLY which doesn't make me happy. But then you can eject the bad tape without running backups again. You can zap the copy later depending on your retension. Sorry if this is what you are already doing.

 

[ArmchairJedi]

When you say the tapes are bad... do you mean you're getting hardwrare errors and its only writing say a few GB to a tape that should hold 200gb and then marking it full and moving onto another tape?. We had that problem, which of course meant that with multiple streams running it woudl used up multiple tapes but only actually use a tiny % of them. Lots of wasted media. Service Pack 2 for 6.1 seems to havemade the problem go away for us.

Armchair Jedi ~ So dense light bends around him ;-)