Daily backup works only on Wednesday???

[jpeck19]

Our company recently upgraded our tape drive to an Exabyte VXA-320 so that we could get more capacity out of our tapes.  We have one job to run nightly every weekday each day with a different tape.  However, the only night we get a complete backup is on Wednesday, backing up approximately 115GB.  Every other night, when the tape reaches about 104GB, Backup Exec says the tape is full and asks for a new tape.  All of the tapes are the same type (Exabyte X23).  Out IT guys worked on the problem for about a month and then gave up. 

If anybody has any suggestions on what may be causing this I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.

[Ken_Putnam]

Is this the same job each night, or different ones?

Is anything else running the other nights, but not on WED?

What is the byte count when it asks for another tape?

[jpeck19]

It is the same job every night.  The only thing that changes are the tapes; we have one for each weeknight.

The byte count is about 104GB when BE will ask for a new tape on every day except Wednesday.  Oddly enough, this was about the maximum we could get on a tape with our old tape drive (VXA-2).  This is why we upgraded to the larger capacity drive. 

No other programs are running on the other nights.

[Ken_Putnam]

What type of media are you using?

is it the same for each night?  Is the WED tape from a different mfg/batch?

[jpeck19]

All of the tapes are made by the same company (Exabyte) and are the same type (X23). 

[Ken_Putnam]

yeah, went back and read your original post

Have you tried a few passes of the Exabyte diagnostics?   (from my reading,  a VXA-320 using X23 tapes should get 160GB native (w/ no compression)  so only 115 should fit with no problems at all

How many hard and soft write errors do these tape have? (You may need to reset the stats)

[jpeck19]

When I click on each tape from the Media tab, it says all of the tapes have zero soft or hard write errors.  One thing I did notice though, in the same window there is a box that says "Appendable Until:".  One the Wednesday tape it says "Infinite - Allow Append".  All the other tapes say "Not Appendable (Media Full)".  Could this be the problem?  I don't know how or why Wednesday's tape is different nor do I know how to change the others if indeed this could be the problem. 

Thanks for the help.

[Ken_Putnam]

could very wel be the root of the problem

Are your jobs all APPEND, or do you run an overwrite periodically (weekly for example)  If all the jobs are append, then when the tape fills up, you cannot write to it until the OPP  (overwrite protection period) has expired, and this basically quick erases the tape, so none of the previously backed up data is available any more

[jpeck19]

The job is setup for Overwrite media...

[Ken_Putnam]

I'm out of ideas at this point

About all I can suggest is some VooDoo tech support.

Create the WED job again from scratch, including the Selection list

[jpeck19]

Thanks for your time Ken.