Noob question: New tapes on a stand-alone drive

[torturedmind]

Hi all.

We have Veritas v6.0MP4 on a Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 using a stand-alone drive. This backs-up data from our Oracle RAC Server on schedules. We manually change the tape before every schedule runs: volume A00001 - every Sat, Sun, and Mon; volume A00002 - every Tue and Wed; and volume A00003 - every Thu and Fri. These three tapes are now full so we acquired a NEW SET of tapes and label them A00001 (for Sat, Sun, and Mon), A00002 (for Tue and Wed), and A00003 (for Thus and Fri) using blabel. Our problem is, no back-ups were ever performed when we started using the new set of tapes. The report status message said...

"Unable to allocate new media for backup; storage unit has none available." Status code 96

We informed our supplier about this and we were told to just use blank tapes without labels as Veritas will do the labeling and update itself of the volumes. We don't want to buy new tapes yet so we erased the labels using bplabel -erase but the above message still appears. We need to get the back-up schedules running asap but we don't know how. Can anyone help us? Thanks in advanced.



kilroy
philippines

"Once a king, always a king. But being a knight is more than enough."

 

[OzzMosiz]

You are micromanaging your backups. NetBackup is supposed to remove the manual complexities.
You should not be labeling the tapes as the same names as previous tapes that are full.

 

[torturedmind]

Thanks for the response OzzMosiz.

You should not be labeling the tapes as the same names as previous tapes that are full.

Yep I agree and I understand that now. I re-labeled them accordingly and followed most steps in this guide to enable NBU to see the new tapes. Am still waiting to see if the scheduled back-up will run in the wee hours of the morning. I'll update this post when I get back tomorrow.

kilroy
philippines

"Once a king, always a king. But being a knight is more than enough."

 

[torturedmind]

After checking the log, there were new messages generated during back-up but no back-up was performed. It just exited with status code 86. Here is the log:

Date Time Media Server Client Job ID Severity Description
02/09/2010 12:00:31 AM backup thp01ora 2825 Warning cannot locate on drive index 0,
No more data is on the tape.
02/09/2010 12:00:32 AM backup thp01ora 2825 Error cannot position media id A00005
for write
02/09/2010 12:11:31 AM backup thp01ora 2825 Warning cannot locate on drive index 0,
No more data is on the tape.
02/09/2010 12:11:32 AM backup thp01ora 2825 Error cannot position media id A00005
for write
02/09/2010 02:01:59 AM backup thp02ora 2827 Warning cannot locate on drive index 0,
No more data is on the tape.
02/09/2010 02:02:00 AM backup thp02ora 2827 Error cannot position media id A00005
for write
02/09/2010 04:00:34 AM backup thp02ora 2828 Warning cannot locate on drive index 0,
No more data is on the tape.
02/09/2010 04:00:35 AM backup thp02ora 2828 Error cannot position media id A00005
for write

I've read somewhere that this could be caused by the tape drive or its driver. The drive is perfectly working before the new set of tapes so I doubt it's the problem. If it's not, then what else could it be? Anyone?


kilroy
philippines

"Once a king, always a king. But being a knight is more than enough."