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southtampaadmin's avatar
17 years ago

Yet another media set question

Sorry, I tried a search, but didn't turn anything up directly related to my current issue.

 

I recently upgrade backup exec from 9.1 to 12, and I also installed it on a different server and I can't seem to get the backups running the way they were.

 

I use a tape drive (LTO), and I typically run 2 backup jobs a day.  I have 16 tapes, Mon-Fri week 1, and Mon-Fri week 2, and 2 extras.  Each morning I come in and eject the prior days tape and put in the current day tape.

 

I use to run my one backup job every 3 hours (about 4 gigs in size), and my other job once at around 9 pm (40 gigs in size).  It use to work fine, do mulptile backups of the one job, and one backup of the one bigger job.  In fact, I could leave the Friday tape in, not change it on the weekends, and it would still be working on Monday.

 

In addition to that, I know everything was working correctly because I've had to do a restore (more than once lol), and when I go to pick the selection, I was given the option to choose from multiple jobs (from up to two weeks prior sometimes) without an issue.

 

 

Now, it seems, no matter how I set the media sets, I can only get one job on a tape, and if I try to run the other job (the bigger one) I get a message saying the tape has overwright protection on it, and can't be used.  As of right now I have the medisoft job set to 2 days overwright protection with infinite append, and the clinician job set to 4 days overwright protection with infinite append.

 

CLIFFS:

 

So basically, I want to run two jobs a day; 1 called medisoft and I want it to run every 6 hours, and another job, called Clinician, once at night, but it all has to be on the same tape, and I would like the jobs to stay there as long as there is room on the tape before it overwrights.  (I also would like to be able to do a bi-weekly system state job for my 3 servers on the tape that is in the tape drive on that particular day.)

  • Wait, how do I set the media set to allow overwright?  Do I just click on allow, and then enter zero for hours or days or weeks?
  • If you put in 0 and hours, weeks, months, or years, and hit OK, you get a message that it is disabled. If you go back in, you will see that it sets it for 0 hours even if you picked weeks, months, or years.
  • Ok, well, that sorta worked.

     

    Now I can run my multiple, different, jobs on the same tape in one day, but I get a message saying that I'm overwrighting data.  After seeing that a couple of times I got suspicious and checked the tape properties and I think everytime a job runs it's overwrighting everything.  The reason I suspect this is I did a backup of 40 gigs last night and when I checked the tape properties it reflected that there was data on the tape (obvisously not 40 gigs due to compresssion but you get the idea).  This morning, without changing the tape, I did the 3 gig job, and when it finished I re-checked the tape properties and it only has less than a gig of space used, and almost 98 gigs free.  So I'm assuming it did the 3 gig job and ran right over the last 4 or 5 jobs I did on the tape since testing yesterday.  I'm also assuming it did the same thing each time I just didn't realize until now.

     

    The funny thing is, I don't remember ever having this much trouble with media sets.  I know, for a fact, that I did mulptile, different jobs on the same tape and it kept them for a while without overwrigting.  I know that I had the media sets set for 3 or 4 day overwright protection with infinite append as the settings.

     

    Also, just for the hell of it, I walked over to the other side of the building (I run two medical groups in the same building), and I checked thier back ups.  They have an almost identical set up, with a SAN storage instead of a tape. They have two jobs, both run at night, both have media sets with the rules of: OVerwright protection of 10 days, allow infinite append, and it works.  I can log into the SAN, see all of the jobs going back for a while (it's a big SAN), and everything is fine.

     

    There has to be one little thing that I'm missing that is driving me out of my mind.

     

    I would like to thank you though for you input thus far, at least I can do a backup and just change tapes.

     

     

  • I would like to take a quick look at your setup if you wouldn't mind. We could use Microsoft SharedView to set up a session to your computer and you can remote into the server from there. I will send you my contact info if you are interested. Please let me know one way or the other.

     

    P.S. Starting Monday, I have to get back to business, so I will be cutting back on this little addiction of answering posts here.

  • I would just like to let those of you, who are internested, that everything works now.  Kevin contacted me and was incredibly helpful and knowledgeable.  I would like to, once again, thank you for your help Kevin