Unreadable Media

[spickett]

I have a couple of instances where my tape media has become unreadable, but Arcserve is still requesting it as part of the regular backup cycle. How is this handled? If I remove the tape from the media pool and put a blank tape in it's place, is Arcserve smart enough to know what's going on?
It seems as long as I leave the bad tape in the Media pool, Arcserve will accept no substitute.
I'm using Arcserve 2000.

 

[davidmichel]

Yes it will use the other tape, just do a quick erase plus on it first.

 

[spickett]

Is this necessary if I'm starting with a blank, unformatted tape?
Also, I'm using a tape library and one of the tapes in question is part of a two tape set, (the backup job spans two tapes). Again, will Arcserve know enough to use the good, serialized tape for part of the job, and work the blank tape in to complete it? I guess that I'll be finding out tonight, one way or another, but I'm trying to figure out whether or not I should be doing something differently before it gets here.

Thanks

 

[davidmichel]

A never used tape is fine. It happens that users will sometimes call a tape that has been formated but has no data on it a blank tape. The Tape Engine will see it as a formated tape and will not use it. By recommending the Quick Erase Plus then regardless it will work. Once the tape has been brought into the media pool there will be no problems.

If the job is overwrite no problem if it is append then that tape that is part of the two tape set will need to be the seq. # 2 tape. ARCserve 2000 can not (at least best I can remember) append to a seq # 1 tape when it spanned.