BackupExec 2012 backup has status of "no devices ready"

[mc7]

I have a backupexec job that does both full and incremental backups to tape.

Tape library has only 1 drive.

For last few days the status of this job is showing "no devices ready" and the job keeps failing with a message simmilar to "This job is allowed to start only before xx:xx time and could not start in this time".

Yesterday morning I saw a message saying that "catalog 5" job was waiting for a tape  number yyyyyy. But in active jobs I can't see a catalog job.

This tape was showing as faulty so I had taken that out.

I had also changed a few tapes in the library before this started happening. I may have run inventory at that time or import.

My question is that should I just run inventory job after the tapes have been replaced in library OR a import needs to be run as well.

And as a result of this import is it running a catalog in the background which is still looking for tape yyyyyy.

And as a result the tape drive is not ready for other jobs. How can I cancel this catalog job?

How can I troubleshoot this and resolve the issue?

[Colin_Weaver]

If you have a catlog job tryiing to run that you cannot see it willl tie up the drive and stop Backup Jobs from running (thus potentially causing the timeout where the backup job sat waiiting beyond it's configured limit). Hopefully this catalog job is not a regularly scheduled one as killing the services whilst it is trying to run will cause it to fail but if it has a schedule it may restart again in the futiure (and unfortunately the only way to get rid of a job that can't be seen in the console that has a repeating schedule  is to start editing the database which is not something we document publicly)

WIth regards the difference between an inventory and an import, an import is used when you use a mailslot in a library to add tapes to the library without opening up the full libary. An import job moves the tape from the mailslot to a storage slot (and whilst it does read the barcodes you do sometimes have to follow up an import with an inventory)

An inventory loads the tape from a storage slot into a tape drive and reads the header information to confirm the ID of the tape against the slot it came from, unless you have tapes in your mailslots you would not run an import after an inventory (and to be honest if you did have tapes in your mailslot you would run the import first)

Just to add to this a scan just asks the robotic arm to read the barcodes without moving the tapes to a tape drive.

[mc7 · Accepted solution]

Thanks Colin.

So if I restart the backupexec services now then would it get rid of this catalog job (unless it has schedule, in which case it will start again at that scheduled time). Is that correct?

And if this job has a schedule somehow then what woudl I need to do in that case?

In the jobs list there are a few inventory jobs that I can see which I had started (to do inventory after inserting tapes) but they come up as scheduled tasks (instead of "run now" type jobs). Why would that be the case?

[Colin_Weaver]

I hope you don't have a hidden scheduled catalog operation as if you do you will need formal help to edit the database (and then the old BE version you are running and potentially the lack of a full support agreemnet may be an issue for you)

You can of course load an empty database and then recreate your jobs (and catalog and backup media that contains current backups) but this would be an if all else fails option.