Tapes ejecting just after job starts

[beholder95]

I have a job scheduled for 6:00 PM every night to run on BE 10d. The drive is an Exabyte VXA2. Every night i switch the tape before i leave and sometimes i'll come in to find the job completed successfully - other times the tape will be out of the drive and the Job will be marked with a ?Loading status as it's waiting for the tape.

Sometimes if I insert the tape it'll run the job fine, othertimes It will just spit it back out.

Is the tape bad?

It's a V23 tape and I've already had to replace some tapes with X23s.

Any help is apprecaited.

- Andy

 

[DTracy]

It sounds like your backup job sometimes exceeds the capacity of the tape. The first tape gets ejected when full and then the job waits for the next tape. Check to see how much data is being written to the tape on a good day and a bad day.

Regards,
David.

 

[adamroof]

I had that just recently on a vs80...stated insert overwriteable media; job never started; new tape!

im on 10d aswell

just to let u know ur not alone...

brand new quantum 1 week old...
will see if happens this weekend.

 

[beholder95]

I'm getting around 28Gig for daily differential backups and between 55 and 60gig for Weekly Full Backups.

The jobs are all set to overwrite so the tape filling up shouldn't be causing it.

 

[adamroof]

well, it happened to me again...i run the same setup, 4 diffs, M-Th, 1 full, F

this is my DC, so not too much data, about 28 gigs for FULL

 

[beholder95]

Ya, this is my DC as well...But it runs a few other things such as Symantec Antivirus, backupExec, Exchange, Sharepoint, as well as Network Drives for 75 users.

Most of the data is Email, and what ever files users store on network drives.

I've got another post about labeling media, Have you ever had the problem where you put a tape in the drive and it doesn't show up either when you click on the drive or when you look at online media?

I'm trying to "organize" my media as whom ever initially installed BE 9 (i did the upgrade to 10 and just copied the settings) didn't do it well.

Do you have 1 media set? Or multiple?

I'm good at figuring stuff out, but i'd like to know how others do it.

Thanks!
Andy

 

[adamroof]

1 media set, why do you label!?

Have Selection Lists for Diff, and Full
Have 2 Policies for Diff and Full
Have 2 Jobs From Policies Diff M-Th; Full F

All set to overwrite, i label media with my tape label paper insert thingy.

It autolabeled in media set 1
DLT000001 through 5

ive had to Inventory a tape to review contents first.

Seems when i slapped in my daily tape, did nothing else, and forgot to cancel weekend yesterday, it started the weekend, completed, then ran the scheduled daily overwriting the weekend. DOH!

So its like job starts, spits out tape, push it back in, then it will run fine. Ill call Veritas - Ooops i mean Symantec - oops i mean *****

Ill let ya know what they say.

 

[adamroof]

Problem "solved"?

The weekend media was used in v9, i just upgraded to 10d
The media was marked as unrecognizeable and was in the Retired Media set (no overwrite possible). I relabeled the tape in the drive, and it added itself to the Scratch Media set.

I then moved the tape (right click > Move to Media Set...)
to the Media Set 1 (which i renamed "Weekly Backup Media")

I then resubmitted the job using Full Backup Policy (first i deleted jobs using that policy) modifying it to use the Weekly Backup Media set.

Most of this was done within the Device and Media tabs in 10D.

So, i now use two media sets, Daily Diff Media and Weekly Backup Media. 4 tapes in the daily, 4 tapes in the Weekly, all labeled according to our strategy using the Veritas labeling mechanism.

Why? Dunno. How? Dunno. Works? Will find out Saturday morning.