Tape saying it's full after 3gb on a full backup

[sfletch]

I have a regional office that is having a very strange problem on some of their full backups.
We run a GFS rotation and about every other week the 2nd or 3rd or sometimes both tapes will only write 3 and a half gig or so, and then say it is full and ask for another tape. The backup will complete successfully as long as you keep feeding tapes. The tape drive is a HP DDS4 running at 20Gb without compression. The amount of data it records on these tapes is random, but usually between 3 and 4 gig. I've tried about everything that I can think of and nothing has helped yet. If anyone has suggestions I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks,
Scott

 

[Drolaw]

I had the same problem. I actually discovered that the tapes I was using had an old BackupExec backup on the tape and that my append box was not checked.

Try doing a long erase on the tapes to see if that corrects the problems. Also make sure you have the append box checked on your GFS job.

 

[sfletch]

Interesting. My append is checked, but doing a full erase is a good idea. I'll give it a try. Thanks!