Why does NICE do this?

[Bartimaeus]

I'm want to understand how NICE decides what data to write to tape.

For the purpose of storing off-site backups, this past Saturday afternoon I changed from "Continuous" Backup Mode, Writing to the Media "Periodically" at: 10 PM Friday night to "Mirroring" Backup Mode, writing and ejecting "Periodically" Tuesday and Friday nights at 9 PM.

Under the "Continuous" method I'd typically end up with one completely full DDS2 tape and another DDS2 with less than 30% used.

Today when I checked the dates of the recordings on both tapes, which indeed "mirrored" and are completely full with only 2% unused, I found only recordings that ranged in date from late July to late August. Naturally, I expected to see recordings from this past Monday and Tuesday. Not good! But I'm not panicing yet. I'm sure Monday and Tuesday's recordings are on the Logger's hard drive since I can query the data. I'm a little nervous right now since my mission critical data didn't show up on the tapes. I wondering what data I'm going to see on Friday night's tapes. Will my mirrored tapes ever catch up?

How does NICE decide what data to write to tape?

Bart

 

[randyb19]

My brief understanding is, with perodic recording, the system will randomly choose which calls to record. I am not sure if there is specific criteria that is used to choose which calls get recorded.

Some people do this to 1) Save on tapes, 2) Use the random recordings for auditing/training, etc.

 

[Bartimaeus]

All's well that ends well. For what its worth, here's what happened.

Indeed, the recordings were on the hard drive and the mirrored tapes did eventually catch up to today. How did I do it?

With the "Backup Mode" set to "Mirroring" and "Start writing to the media" "When the medium is inserted". "Automatically eject the media" "When the medium is full". It took about eleven sets of DDS2 tapes to catch up but the process was actually pretty painless; this worked the heck out the drives, but all in all not bad. The nice thing is that when the tapes auto eject mirroring is suspended until you put two new tapes in the drives. I used the opportunity to check the media contents of the tape in drive two by starting a "retreival". Since tape drive 1 has already ejected its tape you can safely resume auto archiving which won't start until new tapes are seen in both drives. As far as I can tell the hard drive takes all the data its been storing up since the tapes auto ejected then when the new tapes are inserted in the drives starts writing to the new tapes until it catches up to the live action.

Whew...couldn't find any resource, person, helpline, nothing to help with this; thank you Lord Jesus Christ.

 

[randyb19]

Well, I'm glad that you got it worked out. I do not have mirrored drives here, so I was a little out of my league on that part.