Tape is protected by media management 1

[Stynker]

Arcserve V 11.0 on Windows 2003.
I am using DLT autoloader 40GB X 8 tapes Dell PV-122T

Here is my scenario.
6 Daily 1 tape for differential
4 weekly 4 tapes for full
12 weekly 4 tapes for full

total tapes required = 4 x (12 + 4) + 6 = 70 tapes
I have 20 and was expecting the remaining tapes to arrive; however this looks like it may not happen due to budget issues. Problem is, I used my last tape yesterday and because the "tape is protected by media management" I can NOT reformat my monthly, nor previous weekly/daily.

I've, removed my media pool and removed one tape entirely from the db hoping that I could wipe it out for a differential backup last night.

Any suggestions on how to bypass this security? I would like to start from scratch.

Please advise.

 

[davidmichel]

Try updating to 11.1

 

[Stynker]

I tried upgrading to 11.1 and that didn't work. I am sure this has something to do with tape header information regarding the rentention of the data it contains. I guess what I am looking for, is a way to just format the tape - even low level formatting or a third party utility. Tapetest.exe uses the tape engine so I am thinking that is going to cause the same problem, plus my raid5 drives are on the scsi chain which makes me a bit nervous using that util.

I have resorted to plan B which is getting 10 more tapes and doing a manual full backup once a week followed by daily differential. This will rotate every week till I can pull the tapes out of the GFS retention period. I've thought briefly about changing system time, but I'm not going down that road.

I recreated my media pool, merged the tapes I removed from the DB, added them back to the media pool and ran the GFS Media Prediction report. I won't have access to some of my tapes till next tuesday.

So if anyone else has got into this jam and figured a way out please let me know. And for those who don't have enough tapes for GFS, don't do it till you have them in your hands. Measure Twice, cut once.

Stynker

 

[vschumpy]

A quick fix to this would be to delete the media record of the tape you want to erase from the database\media view in the ARCserve GUI.

It should then allow you to erase the tape, but of course this won't solve your long term problem of needing more tapes and may cause you more grief in the long run as you will have media pools which aren't reaching the minimum retention number of tapes.

Maybe a custom rotation would better suit your situation ?

 

[Stynker]

I tried that. Seems Arcserve is reading the header off the tape, knowing full well it's retention period. I ended up merging it in back in the db to put everyting back the way I originally set it up.

I agree with the long term effects of this. I will be doing a manual backup for the next two weeks so I can pull some tapes out of there previous GFS rotation. Then, as you suggested, I will move into a custom rotation and make sure I can write to the older tapes first. Provided the GFS prediction works well, I should have the majority of them in the next month. I only had one monthly set of tapes, so I assume I won't see them till next year, unless I degauss them!!!

Thanks
Stynker.

 

[Stynker]

UPDATE!!! - problem solved.
vschumpy, you were right. Removing the tapes for the database allowed me to erase media plus. HOWEVER!! I tried that and it didn't work before.

Here's what I had to do:
Remove the tape from the database and EXIT ARCSERVE! I guess it does the final SQL transaction on program exit. If you remove the tape and do not exit arcserve, going back into the db for tape view, it will re-populate as though it was never deleted; hence the media protection!

Thanks guys for you help. Sad as it sounds, that made my day.

Stynker