No media found error 96

[mccalia1]

Last night my backups failed with the following message: "unable to allocate new media for backup, storage unit has none available(96)"

So I think to myself, let me check to see which tapes in the library are ready. I run the available_media.cmd script and it lists all the tapes in the Volume Pool. The Tapes which are marked 'available' are the ones in the Tape Library. Surely if these tapes are available then the backups will use these and not fail?

I also noticed that the tapes which are listed in the Volume Pool do not actually appear when I run a Report in the NB GUI e.g Images on Media.

Why do you think the backups are failing even though the tapes are listed as available?

 

[enterprisebu]

Verify that the policy that failed specifies using the volume pool you seeing available media in.

 

[OHWS]

I'm not sure of your setup?? We had similar problems until I familiarized myself with the selection process. When netbackup writes to a tape, it is assigned to that specific storage unit. So you can have ten tapes available in a pool but if they are assigned to a different storage unit then you will get a 96 error. Also if the retention of the available tapes is different than the backup you are trying than you can also get this error. You should always make sure to have a couple of tapes in the scratch pool and this could be avoided. Hope this helps!

 

[mccalia1]

Yep, the volume pool that's assigned to the policy has media in the library, used the available_media.cmd file it comes up as 'available'

 

[alray]

We had a similar problem and found that, although the tapes were marked as AVAILABLE they were, in actual fact EXPIRED [i.e. they had reached their maximum number of loads limit].

Ray

 

[mccalia1]

I haven't set any limits, I didn't think there were any by default. If there is, what are they? or where could I find more information on this.

 

[alray]

You can use either the jnbSA GUI or the bpadm command line interface to dig around and find out this sort of information.

You then need just a bit of care to see what is and isn't available.

Using the bpadm interface this particular "problem" can be viewed by selecting the "media management" option from the first menu and then the "print information about volumes" option. [Note - we are still using the 3.2 version of the software]

I hope this helps.

Ray

 

[rhaig]

if the available tapes have data on them from a different retention level, they will not be used for the new job. NBU by default doesn't mix retention levels on tape.