Restores fail, consistantly

[sddarkman619]

Brightstor Arcserve 11.5 sp4. with recent firmware upgrade.

Backups seems to work fine, restores consistantly fail if they are over 10 gigs it seems. I was able to do a successful restore the other day of a 7 gig file, but anything that I have tried which have been over 10 gigs fails. we recently went thru a period where the backups weren't working either due to media failure so we bought all new media(tapes) and of a different brand and they started working fine. however the critical part, the restore is not working now.
There are several errors here, hardware or controller, and media error or duplicate session.
any insight would be helpful, thanks.

here is my log:
BrightStor ARCserve Backup -- Restore


Job No....................... 3
Job ID....................... 1726
Workstation.................. MYSERVER
Source....................... 6/12/08 12:29 PM, ID D6C5, Sequence #1
Session...................... 1
Target....................... E:\restore
Start Time................... 10/09/08 8:58 AM
E3713
Unable to read from media. (MEDIA=6/12/08 12:29 PM, EC=CONTROLLER FAILURE or HARDWARE ERROR)
Total Directories............ 1
Total File(s)................ 0
Total Skip(s)................ 0
Total Size (Disk)............ 0 KB
Total Size (Media)........... 1,454.28 MB
Elapsed Time................. 24m 9s
Average Throughput........... 60.21 MB/min
Total Error(s)/Warning(s).... 1/0
N3765
Media Error During Restore of Session, Checking For Duplicate Session
N3766
Media Error During Restore of Session, No Duplicate Sessions Found


Totals For................... Job
Total Session(s)............. 1
Total Directories............ 1
Total File(s)................ 0
Total Skip(s)................ 0
Total Size (Disk)............ 0 KB
Total Size (Media)........... 1,454.28 MB
Elapsed Time................. 24m 9s
Average Throughput........... 60.21 MB/min
Total Error(s)/Warning(s).... 1/0


Restore Operation Failed.

 

[hudman]

Are you doing a validate at the end of each backup job? My HP DAT drive did something similar where it would record fine but it gave errors when validating the backup. It would start by producing the error once in a while then it would occur more frequently. My guess it was the read heads going bad. Eventually every backup job would fail to verify. This happened with 3 HP DAT drives - all except the last one happened under warranty over a period of 8 years. When the error started occuring I knew the drive itself was going to fail completely within a few months. I tried the new tapes too which seemed to help at first but the drive would always get worse and eventually die. I also made sure I was running the cleaning tape according to the manufacturers instructions but I guess tape drives only last but so long. Not sure if this is your problem but it might be something worth investigating.

 

[davidmichel]

get the time stamp of those errors and then cross reference them with the Tape Engine log tape.log. The tape log will have the details. post here. Also need the details of the hardware configuration.