weekend differential is failing on sunday - works saturday?

[uniond]

Hi,

I have just taken a new job, and am trying to get our backups here back up to speed as they have been overlooked for some time now. were on win2k server, and BE 9.1

I worked through all of my issues reading through past posts - this site rocks!!, but I am stumped on this one:

we run full backups mon-fri... of which the friday tape also backsup the weekend differentials.... I got the Friday full backup to complete successfully and, to my surprise, the saturday differential was a success, yet the Sunday differential was hanging when I got in this morning, and the alert said to please remove the media... which i did, and then it prompted to insert overwriteable media??? not sure why this is (btw - i am very new at administering backups), as the weekend backup ran fine saturday, but not sunday, and its the same job.
I have the weekend job set to overwrite if no appendable media is found, so (I think) it should have appended sundays to saturdays.... UNLESS the tape is full, which could be the problem, but I am not sure.

any thouhgts on this?

thanks

Jon

ps we have a sony tape drive with ait-2s. the friday backup was 50 gb, and the differential on sat was about 16 gb... the sunday one failed - it had a size of around 4 gb when i cancelled the job.

 

[justin2000]

Sounds like the tape was full.
Maybe you should look at doing incrementals on Sat and Sun to get around this.

 

[uniond]

Thanks justin2000.

That is what I thought, and I have been looking into doing incrementals all morning - There isn't really any difference though between the two different methods.

unless - oh - the sunday backup would be even smaller then, because it would only backup the files that changed from sat to sun.

Thanks again

Jon