missing selections in Restore

[vacantstare]

I seem to be losing successful backups somewhere in the catalog. I know they completed successfully, but when I look through the available selections under Restore, they aren't there.

Already looked through the Veritas website and followed the instructions for Document ID 272886 'How to manually force Backup Exec to re-index the on-disk catalogs'

This did nothing....

I'm running BE 9.1 on a windows 2003 server.

Any ideas?

 

[jpr4re]

you may have already done this but just thought i would mention it. have you tried going to the media tab and locating the media label, highlight it, and then click to the restore tab. if you got a backup up, it should take you directly to the backup that is associated with the media label.

 

[belenus]

I exactly have the same problem with Veritas BE 9.1 on a Windows 2003 server. I'm using an Overland NEO 2000 library with two Quantum SDLT 600 tape drives. I would be interested in your backup hardware - maybe the problem is related to a specific hardware configuration.

 

[SQLBill]

I don't use 9.1, but there should be an option to run the catalog. That will 'refresh' the catalog and should find any that aren't already listed.

BTW-VacantStare, are you backing up to disk or tape? If tape, a 'dumb' question is - are the tapes in the backup device? If they have been removed they might not be listed.

-SQLBill

 

[belenus]

I have already tried this otpion but was not able to rebuild the catalog. The job failed with a "data on medium is inconsistent" message. From my point of view, this could mean everything; maybe, that the tape is damaged (but in that case we have a drop out of nearly all of our tapes) or that data has been corrupted during writing to the tape due to a software or hardware error or the drive cannot read the stored data anymore.

 

[SQLBill]

How many tape devices do you have in your library? If more than one, can you compare the 'bad' tapes to see if they were used in the same tape device? Maybe you have a bad tape device and it's damaging the tapes. For example: I have three tape devices in my library and I assign full backups to one device and other backup jobs to the other two devices.... So in my case, if all my full backups are having problems, I know it's the one tape device. If it's a mix of tapes, then I know it's something else (or all the devices).

-SQLBill

 

[gregbirdsall]

I had this same problem yesterday, it was a silly error.

I had Overwrite Protection set to None - so it was overwriting and not informing me of it.

Just my two cents.

 

[belenus]

We have two drives and the problem occurs on both. All tapes in the affected media sets are overwrite protected - BE is only allowed to append data.

 

[vacantstare]

Well, as much as I hate admitting this, I had my media set to overwrite if no appendable media was available. I wasn't keeping a close eye on just how much data was being written, so....I overwrote my own backups.

 

[belenus]

From my point of view this option is OK if the "Overwrite protection period" of the corresponding media set is defined as "Infinite - don't allow overwrite" and the "Append period" is defined as "Infinite - Allow append". Together with "media type overwrite protection level" set to "Full" this guarantees that medias in the corresponding set cannot be overwritten. BE writes data to a tape until the end of this tape is reached and then either fetches an overwriteable medium from the "Temporary media pool" or, if no tape is present there, interrupts the job and asks to insert a new overwritable medium, but NEVER overwrites the actual medium.
The point is that, in our case, restore selections disappear even if the medium is new and only 10 GB has been written to that tape so far - to a tape that has a capacity of 300/600 GB (!!).

 

[belenus]

We now have found the reason of our problems: if a job that backs up more than one drives (or servers) cannot connect to the first drive but successfully to another one in the line, BackupExec resets the set counter for storing the backuped data. Thus BE starts to overwrite all stored data (or at least the database entries used for identifying the restore selection). Thus from the point the counter is reset, the corresponding tape is no longer usable for restoring the data backuped so far.
As an example consider a notebook user that connects his laptop to the network just at that time the backup job starts to work - to late to connect to the first drive, but accurately timed for backing up the second drive - this will reset the set counter and make the tape unusable for restoring data stored so far.
We perform the incremental backup of our notebooks in one job at the same time each day - everytime the first notebook is not connected to the network and BE can successfully connect to another one, BE resets the set counter.
As a workaround, we now backup a small file directly from the backup server at the beginning of each job - this guarantees, that BE can connect successfully to the first drive and we have no problems anymore. We do this for each job because we want to avoid that a reboot of any server at the wrong time will corrupt the backup data of a whole tape.
From our point of view this behaviour is definitely a bug in the Veritas BE software.