Cataloging tapes from a "restored" backup job?

[JohnLR]

      We recently had a very large backup job (5+TB) that took several weeks to complete.  Something in BE or the library crashed as it was in the final stages, and the job ended up in the history greyed out with a status of "restored".

     The tapes used were moved to correct media pool, and show the correct allocated date, but the catalog is not updated. The tapes used were being overwritten, and if we attempt to restore by media it lists the results of the previous backup jobs on the tapes.  I've tried inventorying and cataloging these, and the job activity shows the data I'm looking for cataloging, but at the end we get the infamous "e0000900- The requested media is not listed in the media index" error".   I've tried moving one tape to retired media and deleting it, then importing it, but I get the same result.

     I've read the articles that say to deleted the media, stop all services, and rename the catalog directory, etc, but what happens to my existing catalogs in that case?  This is not just a backup system, it's our archival system, and we have something like 200 TB archived to tape, and we perform retrievals daily. Building all new catalogs is not an option.  Any helpful ideas? 

[Ken_Putnam]

Try shutting down BE and renaming the \Catalogs folder to \Calogs.old or .prod

Restart all services

Inventory all the tapes in that set

Catalog starting with the first and continue in order

If this works, remember to set the Catalog back before running any production jobs

[JohnLR]

But isn't that creating 2 sets of catalogs? This is for a long term archive -  I can't expect someone to know 2 or 3 years from now  that they have swap catalog directories if they need files from October 2011. On top of everything else, a lot of the files have already been removed from disk, so I can't just back them up again.  

    We don't have the disk space or frankly the time take the backup system off line for a week or more while we create new catalogs, catalog all of these mystery tapes, then restore all of these files to disk then swap back to the production catalogs, and back them up again.  There has got to be a better answer. 

[JohnLR]

 Since creating an alturnate set of catalogs was not an option, we shipped the tapes to another location that had a seperate instance of Backup Exec.

    We inventoried the tapes and cataloged them on a different server.  Some of them cataloged successfully, but most still returned the "e0000900 - the requested media is not listed in the edia index.. blah blah blah, run an inventory and resubmit the catalog." error.  Except they have been inventoried, and they are listed in the media index.

. What's irks me is while the catalog job is running you can see the files in the job activity - there has GOT to be a way to get these cataloged,