Backup stuck on QUEUED forever!

[amaur96]

Hi, I have Backup exec 12.5 Rev2213 with all the latest patches installed on my server.

I am trying to backup a remote server (which used to work fine a few days ago) however, the job sits on QUEUED forever. It also gives no indication what it's waiting for.

I have restarted both the backup and remote server, cleaned the drive, paused & unpaused the device, checked and cleared all the alerts and tried a different tape. I am now out of ideas.

Any suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated.

[chicojrman]

Try stopping and restarting the Backup Exec services. Inventory your tapes possibly. If your doing b2d try this: create new back-up to disk folders but make them removable back-up to disk folders, sometimes when you create a back up to disk folder and it's an external Drive, veritas loses track of the drive connecting and dissconnecting, but if you create a removeable back up to disk folder this should take care of that. Give it a try and let me know.

[amaur96]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I have tried stopping and starting the services but same thing. I also tried running an inventory on the tape (which works fine) but it doesn't seem to help.

I'm not doing a B2D but may try it as a test.

I wish it would give you some kind of indication as to what it's waiting for!! What the hell does QUEUED mean? May as well just say "Waiting"!

Something I did notice though, if I try to cancel the job, nothing happens. The job status remains as "queued". The only way I can get it out of this state is to stop/start the services. Does this indicate something?

[rookie11]

how many drives u hav ?
check whether it is configured for the correct drive
is the drive activated or enabled ??
try to deactivate then activate drive ,library

[amaur96]

I have one drive.
It is configured for the correct drive (not that it has a choice seeing it's the only one - but confirmed anyway)
The drive is enabled and online. I tried disabling and re-enabling but still no good.

Not sure what you mean by "deactivate/reactivate the library"?

[rookie11]

i meant the same as disabling and reenablin it from backup exec console

[amaur96]

How do I enable the drive so it's visible to Windows without uninstall Veritas? At the moment in "Computer Management/Storage/Removable Storage/Libraries" it shows my drive but has a red cross over it. I know Veritas disables it to take full control of it but I want to try NTBackup. Obviously it needs to be visible to Windows so I can use it.

[amaur96]

Decided to uninstall and reinstall, what a waste of time that was. Even after an uninstall (manual) I reinstalled BackupExec and the damn thing still went to QUEUED.

Looks like it's time to remove it and use something else to backup the data!

[rookie11]

disable drives from backup exec .go to tools>options >de select inventory the drives when backupexec services restart

uninstall the drives[disabled in backup exec it should recognize it] then reinstall the drive .restart removable storage service 
 

[Larry_Fine]

Can you backup local data from the server BE is installed on?  It might be a problem with the remote agent.

[rlj]

I have this problem as well..  remote backups work fine, to both disk and tape.  Local backups are queued forever..  Ron

[rookie11]

amaur please try to reboot autoloader and ur server sometimes SCSI interface hav problem it will not work properly

[lebisol]

The whole finger pointing from BE to hardware is a BS and waste of time.
I have gone though this issue and tried all of the mentioned in seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/255501.htm (maybe it helps you)
-updated OS SCSI drivers then revered back to BE drivers
-updated firmware on the loader
-restared services (local and remote agents)
-rebooted server
-rebooted loader
-assigned different SCSI ID
-cleaned the drive
-re-inventory, re-format, re-partition loader
-used new tapes
-wasted and risked DAYS

Solution was a clean start....delete the jobs, file selection lists and purged the db, create new jobs and lists, restarted the service.
I came to accpet this is a must do job every 3-4 months beacuse randomly 50% of the jobs all of a sudden have issues.

....VERITAS...come back please!!!

[Pauldg]

I have been experiencing the same issue at one of our sites, Try to inventory the drive and the job stays in queue, but everything is online and working fine. The only way I could clear this Inventory job was to kill all the services then restart them, but that didn't resolve the issue of the Inventory job going into a queue job status, even though there was no other jobs running.

What I did just to see how it would go was, in the Windows Services I start the Removable Storage service, yes I know this is not supposed to be a required or best practice. But when I had start this service my Inventory works as it should - 100% successful.

I am still running tests on how this service runnning may affect the backups.

Food for thought anyway, I would be interested to find out if this resolves the issue for anyone else.

Cheers

[Larry_Fine]

Try to inventory the drive and the job stays in queue

This may help
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/308627.htm

[breb02]

Same problem. All started after creating partitions.
I tried almost everything (including solutions from this topic) ... nothing worked
Solution:
 - shutdown backup unit
 - shutdown server
 - start up backup unit (wait for full initialize)
 - start up server
 - run live-update
 - delete all jobs/selection lists/partitions/media sets (no specific order)
 - recreate media sets/partitions/selection lists/jobs (this exact order)
 - run inventory (completed successfully)
 
Just restarting the machines might fixed the problem (didn't tested) ... I prefered to recreate all jobs/configuration.
Hopefully I won't have to do this every 2-3 months.

Cheers,
 Breb

[wearyuser]

Pausing and then unpausing the server worked for me.  Under devices, right click on the server name and pause.  My server wasn't paused, but the inventory started working after this.