Job freezing

[msteinblock]

Brightstor Arcserve 11.1
Windows Server 2003

I am having problems with a backup job freezing. The job appears to be running fine, the status shows good and the tape animation shows it is use, yet at appr. 1.5 hours the job will just hand there. It will never proceed. I have tested the possibility of bad files, corrupt files, ran checkdisk. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the software from scratch. Smaller jobs run fine. Both large and small jobs run fine in NT backup, eliminating the possibility of a hardware problem. I will mess with it for a few days and get it to work....works fine for about a week then back to this problem. I have tried calling CA, they leave me in worse shape than when I started.

Any ideas as to what the problem may be??

Thanks for the help in advance!!

~Matthew

 

[vschumpy]

If you double click on the frozen job - does it appear to freeze backing up the same item each time? If so, what exactly is it trying to backup at the time of the freeze?

What is the last few lines in the activity log before the freeze? Is the tape drive physically doing anything when the freeze occurs?

Have you tried deleting and recreating the job from scratch. Is it a local or remote backup? If remote backup are the agents at the same version and patch level?

What drive are you using? Is it an internal or external drive? What patch level is ARCserve and Windows at.

Sorry about all the questions, but any number of reasons could be the cause and the gaps need to be filled to narrow the potential cause down.

 

[msteinblock]

At first I thought it was the same items, so I started taking items out of the job. It still stops at the same time frame, right at 1.5 hours. I dont think it is a file issue.

The activity log shows a few things, but they are well before the actual time the job stops. There are no errors or anything out of the ordinary in the logs.

The tape drive in the software appears to be still running, yet the physical tape drive is just sitting there doing nothing.

Have tried deleting the job and creating a new one several times. The last time around it started working after I did that. But it only worked for a week or so.

No remote backups, no remote agents. All patches and updates done on both Windows and CA.

Internal drive, not sure of the make as I am offsite. I honestly do not think it is hardware, I can get it to work just fine all the time via nt backup.

 

[vschumpy]

With it being a 1.5 hour time I'm wondering on the off chance especially with it being an internal drive whether it's an overheating issue. There was an advisory a while back for SDLT internal drives requiring additional fan kits.

Is there any way you can check the internal drive logs to see if there are any hard or soft errors logged to the drive which might tie up with tie the job freezes?

Sounds strange, but as ARCserve works through SCSI directly rather than through the Windows driver model it has potential to make your backup faster and therefore work your hardware harder, potentially generating more heat.

On the same path of investigation is anything reported in the Windows system or application event logs around the time of the problem?

You also mention that NT backup runs fine. I take it you have remembered to disable the system level drivers for the tape drives when using ARCserve, as this could certainly be a contributary factor. Especially as you say if it works with NT Backup (which won't work without the system level driver) and doesn't with ARCserve (which provides device support via its own tape engine - and doesn't require the system level drivers which just get in its way).

Again along the same lines, if you have any Insight Manager or similar components polling device status, try disabling these.

Is it also possible that the tape is potentially ready to span to a second tape, but for whatever reason the message or pop up isn't happening?

A lot of the stuff I am talking about here, and much more is covered in this document:

http://supportconnect.ca.com/sc/redir.jsp?reqPage=search&searchID=TEC342813

It would still be useful if you could get the tape drive make model and firmware revision level (you can see this in ARCserve Device Manager), as there have been a few firmware related issues in the past which have caused issues similar to this, but this from memory is quite some time ago.