Tapelibrary Question

[Nikolay23]

Hi,
I have a 7 tapeloader with ArcServe 2000. I am running INC backup monday through thursday. The tapes are being labeled with the name and sequence number. The problem that I am having is when one of the tapes (let's say #3) goes bad and cannot be read/written during the backup. What happenes next is that I cannot continue the backup since it keeps looking for the tape with sequence #3 as the next media to continue the backup, but this tape is bad and cannot be read. The tapes 4,5,6,7 are blank and avavilable, but it never goes to them to continue the backup job. I cannot continue with the backup for the rest of the week. Any suggestiond on how to approach it?
Thanks,

 

[efrenee]

It appears you need to modify your queued job and on the Backup Media options, change both first and additional backup media selection to the "Overwrite same media name or Blank media" choice.

I am assuming that all 7 available tapes are part of the same media group and that you are using a 7-day GFS rotation.

 

[Cyklops]

This is a problem that cannot be dealt with in ARCserve 2000. v11 is the first version were you can configure ARCserve to seek for other media when one tape goes bad.

regards

 

[Nikolay23]

I am not using GFS, but custom schedule.
I do have overwrite blank media selected for first and additional media.
so, what is the best approach to deal with this problem besides getting V11?

Thanks,

 

[davidmichel]

There is not much to do.

Lets look at this.
Backup runs, writes to tape 1, 2, 3, and then fails with media error.
Tape 2 has an incomplete session which continues on tape 3. Data is missing so we don't now if this session finished and then next session started on 3 or if it errored out while still writing this span session. Either way there is valid data on tape 3, and tape 2 finishes with an incomplete session.

The program is going to read tape 2 and find that it is incomplete and there is a continuation block pointed to tape 3. No tape 3 then no continuation of the back.

In 11 they changed it so that it will just give up and start over again with a new tape so now there will be two tapes with the same name and sequince number but with different IDs.

So either upgrade or pull those tapes and let the job start with new blank tapes. When you are ready to reuse tape 1 and 2 erase them. Tape 3 send back to the manufacture for replacement.