BE12.5 says I don't have enough free space on B2D

[Marco_Tafur_-_Q]

HI all!..

Well, I got this customer who has BE 12.5 and his HP autoloader died a few months ago. 

We sold them a 10TB NAS so they could backup using B2D in the meantime (they were going to buy a new autoloader anyways). The NAS is a Lacie 5Big Network 2 with five disk in RAID 5 using two bonded giga ethernet pipes in load balancing.

Everything was fine until last week, when it was needed to rotate / delete old media because of low disk space (say, 100GB free). I deleted the first two weeks (freeing about 2TB of disk space) but then BE said I had no space available on the NAS when I ran a job. Moreover, all jobs halted or were canceled with a "Media Error" and set the B2D folders to offline. Although I put them online, jobs will faill saying "no free space available".

Interestingly enough, any of the B2D folders has the "low space threshold" option enabled, so that would not be supposed to happen.

I had to restart services to be able to start the jobs and backup normally.

Thanks for your insights!

Marco Tafur

[CraigV]

Hi,

Did you delete the B2D files through WIndows Explorer, or did you erase them through BE itself which is the preferred way?

If you did so using Windows Explorer, you've probably messed up the B2D structure. You can try going through the B2D folder within BE and deleting files there, but you may have to consider creating a new B2D and directing the jobs to this. Anything that is left as valid data in the original B2D can be duplicated through BE to the new folder. Once done, delete the old folder and all the remaining contents.

If you're having to do this manually, then your Append/OPP protection on the media set/s isn't correct either, so take a look at that!

Thanks!

[Marco_Tafur_-_Q]

Craig,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, what I normally do (I don't know if it is right) is the following:

As the media sets have no overwrite / append protection (the customer does not want to use them, although I told them so) we first locate what we want to delete (the first two weeks in this case) and identify the media we want to delete.

Then, we associate the media to "retired media" in order to be able to remove the catalogs and delete that media

Finally, we delete the physiical media using Windows Explorer.

I guess this is not the best way to do it, but it is necessary. If I inventory the B2D folder, it should be able to rebuild the structure right? I noticed that whenever I restart the services, BE uses the B2D folders as if it is looking for something. Restarting services was the only way to let BE jobs to start and finish without incidents.

Thanks,

Marco

[CraigV]

...maybe try a Catalog job and see if this sorts it out!

[Marco_Tafur_-_Q]

I'll have to wait at least a week to comply with my customer's data retention policy.

I'll get back to you on monday next week!

[CraigV]

...running a catalog doesn't do anything. It just indexes the B2D.

[Larry_Fine]

Erasing the media from within BE should free up disk space, with other risks & complications.

[Marco_Tafur_-_Q]

Which ones?

[Larry_Fine]

the ones you were going to retire and delete.  Running an erase job should leave the .bkf file in place, but reset it to zero bytes (or nearly zero).

[Marco_Tafur_-_Q · Accepted solution]

hi guys, So I ended up doing the same until.the new autoloader comes...but ill restart the service whenever I do that. Thanks for your insights!