Veritas spits out tape before completion 6

[PalmStrike]

I have gone over this forum, and read so many threads with this same problem as i am having, i.e., one minute you are backing up fine, (in my case because somebody else configureded Back up exec) the next minute, it no longer wants to play ball.

Has anybody found out what it is yet that suddenly makes backup exec dicide it no longer wants to fit 12GB onto a 24GB DAT?

If it helps, all I did was be ill one day, so i failed to change a tape. In the past our old IT bloke would reset something and that would be fine.

 

[bbos360]

same problem here -> when setting compression to 'software' all ok!

 

[mot98]

Hi All,

Just an update here. Backups started spanning 3 tapes again, so I ran the Tape Diagnostic tool again. Somehow the hardware compression has magically turned itself off.

I rebooted the machine, and compression is now enabled again.

Not sure what is causing this, but I am going to contact Veritas to see if there is a fix for this.

mot98


"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."
- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)

 

[PalmStrike]

Madness, why won't mine work, I find it hard to believe that the fellow that set it all up for us would get a tape drive that is too small, but this is what it is feeling like.

I have been to Veritas, and I have been to HP, and they all say we need an upgrade, but after only 3 months of using the thing,

this is doing my head in, might just go and shhot myself!!

 

[SQLBill]

Palmstrike,

You've probably already tried this, but the one thing that I have found to cause most tape compression problems is that it appears:

If you are using Veritas' Drivers, you need to have compression set to SOFTWARE.

If you are using the tape drive vendor's drivers, you need to have compression set to HARDWARE.

-SQLBill

 

[PalmStrike]

OK chaps,

After trying to tackle this problem now for a fe months, I have the answer.

In this particular case, what we are backing up has grown, beyond the scope of these tapes.

I think the reason that I was so determined is because you would have thought that the fellow recomending, and installing the device would have accounted for that to happen for maybe one or two years time, not for just three months.

So as a result, we can now only backup the information store on our email server, but no longer the mailboxes.

Thanks very much for all your help, i now know veritas like the back of my hand.

Rob

 

[onslaught]

Well I will add my name to the list of people having the same problem..

We have an HP LTO Ultrium drive that backs up around 145GB data. Recently, the device is deciding to backup less than this amount, and now prompts for a change of tape at around the 132GB mark.

It seems to very from night to night how much it does backup, because the night before it successfully went through a complete backup, so it appears to be tape related, as opposed to a system setting.

Im going to investigate the software only compression option tonight, and have run a cleaning tape through a couple of times today and will long erase, and retension to see if that has any notable effect on backup.

 

[SteelBurner]

Onslaught,

you might not have to check your compression settings or erase and retension the tape. I'd refer you to Qdog's reply on this tread (Feb 08, 2003): Check soft-write errors on the affected tape(s) which is the reason for your problem.

SteelBurner

 

[onslaught]

Thanks for the reply.. Unfortunately I have already checked out his possible fixes to the issue.

I have examined the eventlog, and exchange maintenance is only being done on sunday nights. The problem occurs during a normal file backup stage on a local drive..

Ive changed cleaned up the backup selection in text mode (where it had an incorrect drive selection -since been removed) which was not showing in the tree selection mode.

In around 6 months of usage only one soft-write error has occured. Couldnt retension an ultrium tape, but have done a long erase, and will see how it goes tonight.

Thanks for the quick reply!

cheers
David

 

[Valerian]

I finally had a look at the compression settings for the particular job that was having this problem and it was set to hardware compression and if not, then none. I set it to "hardware, if not, then software, if not then none" and it is now back working fine all on one tape again. Yay!

 

[PalmStrike]

Hi there,

I have now sorted out my problem, but bear in mind that it I was trying to back up Microsoft exchange.

All it was for me is that the Information Store had grown. I did not at the time know that could happen. Hence it was not backing up fully. I was originally backing up 3GB of data twice (IS and mailboxes) ant it stopped backing up when I was trying to back up 6GB.

Find out how much you are trying to backup.
Find out what you are backing up, and more to the point find out if what you are backing up is already compressed or is compressable data.
Also with the back up tapes, they often come 12/24GB, or 24/48GB storage. This is very misleading, as not all data is compressable, so go by the first figure, and if you get more on there, then look at it as a Billy Bonus.

I hope this might help some of you guys, it took me 6 months to find all this out, but since then, I have had absolutely no problems whatsoever.

 

[statheist]

What is an acceptable number of read/write errors for a tape? I've been unable to find this anywhere.

 

[PalmStrike]

Well if it helps, on the backup on our main server, we use Seagate, which I believe veritas bought and renamed, as I have not as yet found a difference in the look feel and operation of it, but on there we had read and write errors of over 100.

What I did was to Clean the tape drive 5-6 timesand reset the cleaning statistics and do a thorough erase of a tape then do your usual back up with it.

When you come to it in the morning you can get a better idea of how many errors you are getting. If you look at an accumulated figureit can get blown out of proportion. Bear in mind that when you reset the cleaning stats, you might want to take note of all the figures to for reference.

the read and write errors are very valid, but with the research that I did on it, I figured out that a lot of the time it is just a dirty head, or a tape that needs wiping.

If you then still have problems, I would start a new thread on this one, to bring it to someones attention.

Hope this helps.

 

[MieMie]

"OFO: Unable to get minimum quiet time window for physical volume.
OFO: Initialization failure on: "\\SERVERNAME\D$"
Backup Exec failed with this message. Not sure what this means. Any thoughts? Thanks!

 

[PalmStrike]

We do not run a open file option with our back up, but I did find this on the Veritas website, if it opens properly for you

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/194940.htm

Good luck

 

[dogmata]

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/199542.htm

 

[onslaught]

Gee I havent checked back on this topic for a while, thankfully my problem has been resolved.

It turns out that while the data was increasing in size every day, that more of it was being zipped up by a department, which resulted in it remaining approximately the same size, but reduced the amount I could backup, because my compression ratio was being reduced slightly each day as a result.

Hope that helps some of you.

cheers
David