BE 2010. Restore of old and non-catalogized data. e0000900 error. consequenсe of by Symantec suggested action?

[Ark_]

Dear Support!

I have in our production the BE 2010 version of the product.

at the moment we have to backup all the data since last 5 years, but we have the catalogues for last year only.

the actual installation of BACKUP EXEC on particular server has a number of different tabe drives attached.

Although one particular tape drive was for some years "retired", it is still listed under BE´s devices and is ready to work.

this particular tape we would like to use for that backup-job mentioned above.

If I put into the drive old medias, and try to inventarize and catalogize them, I get the e0000900 error.

regarding Symantec, it would following action suggested, like that one, described in the link:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/catalogs-do-not-finish

particularly, I quote:

"""""""""""

The catalogs are bases on media families, a family gets started with an overwrite job.  If your job was an append job, then those tapes that your are trying to catalog belong to a family that has more media associated with it.  This will always failed the catalog job no matter that the job cataloged data. 

http://support.veritas.com/docs/279903

What is a Media Family?

To avoid the failure during the catalog job, go to Tools> Options> Catalog and deselect the option "request all media in the sequence for catalog operations".  This will forced Backup Exec to ignore the family group and just cataloged the media that is intended to catalog.

If you are still missing data on the restore selection, then there are more tapes that will need to be catalog.

"""""""""""

simultaneously we have some other jobs going on on this server and those jobs, from my point of view, need the option "request all media in the sequence for catalog operations" activated.

Unfotunately the GUI of the BE does not have the opportunity to activate/deactivate the option "request all media in the sequence for catalog operations" for one particular tape drive.

well, now I have a question:

which consequences on our actual jobs will we have if we will deactivate the option "request all media in the sequence for catalog operations" on the BE software?

I hope I have formulated my issue clearly enough to get a usable response.

If not- I am ready to provide any additional information regarding that issue.

If there would be some other possibility/workaround in order to solve my issue?

Thank you very much!

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Ark.

[Ruchi]

Request all media in sequence

Catalogs media starting with the lowest known tape number in the tape family. For example, if you don’t have tape one, the catalog job will begin with tape two. If you uncheck this option, the catalog job begins on the tape that you specify.

If you uncheck Request all media in the sequence for catalog operations, then you cannot select the Use storage media-based catalogs check box.

[Ark_]

Hi Ruchi,

Thank you very much for your response!

As I see the situation, at that moment we didn't take a care about tabe numbers.

we got our bands from distributor bar-code marked, and used them randomly.

I could imagine following process:

1. it is a backup job being planed.

2. we put into tape drive some number of tapes, that it will be definitively "more then enough" and start backup.

at the very first time of backuping of the data, the catalogue will ge generated, and it will be some amount of tape-media used.

all those medias we put into right place and it was there for some years.

3. after that we make an other backup and other backup and so on...

at the moment the old the catalogue structure is not anymore awailable...

now I would like to recover the data.

So, first of all I need to catalogize the very first backup, in order to do it..

after that I need to recover the data corresponding to this catalogue, and after that, I will recover the second backup, than the third one and so on...

but this will be done simultaneously with the backup of some new data.

If I will check out the option mentioned above, will I have any issues with my backup jobs, that are being working on the BE?

wbR.

Ark.

[pkh]

The tape sequence mentioned above is the sequence of tapes used in a backup, not the sequence of the tapes' label.  For example, a backup job may use TAPE08, TAPE03 and TAPE06 and this is the sequence you should catalog the tapes.

Since you are re-cycling your tapes, you should determine whether they have been overwritten by newer backup jobs.  If they were overwritten, then the catalog information for the old overwritten backup will be deleted from the catalog, only the catalog for the current backup on the tape will be in the catalog.