Defective Tape Effects

[Steven__Monti]

I have a server that seems to have trouble with the Tuesday night backups (intermittently). Twice the tape has been found 'ejected' in the morning, and once there was a 'media inconsistancy' error. Most of the time the tape works with no problems.

My question is: Could a tape being defective cause it to eject from the drive, not immediately, but after some time goes by (an hour) or backup is attempted?

If that is not likely then I may need to look at 'system tampering'. I switched out the Tuesday tape with a new one as of this post..

[A_van_der_Boom]

It could be that during the course of the backup, BE notice to much errors while writing to tape and decides to break off the backup.

You can check the media statistics, if you see many soft - hard write errors, this might indicate a problem with the tape. (or tape drive if there are more tapes which have this problem)

Replacing the tape, which you have already done, is the easiest way to see if the problem is gone.

Regards
A van der Boom

[Steven__Monti]

Well, this only happens on Tuesday nights. As you noted we have switched out the tape and we will se if there are further errors. I have had no other problems with the tapes on any other days.

The question that I really need to know is if the tape would be ejected by the program itself. Error emails I have received from BE have been 'no media in the drive', then I call over to the physical location & they re-insert the tape and then the backup goes fine with no problems.

I'm trying to see if someone intentionally ejected the tape or if it could have been BE

[Mike_Morgan_4]

Is it the same backup (job/files) being ran on Tuesday, compared to the rest of the days it runs? If so, is there a process that runs at the same time which may be causing the job to fail (files in use, etc) and spit out the tape?

[padmaja_rajopad]

Hi,

Some of the reasons why a tape is ejected by BE :

1) "Eject media after job completes" option is activated

2)The tape is full and BE needs another tape for backup

3)The media set properties of the tape do not match with the desired properties and hence the tape is ejected

Check whether there are any active "Alerts" in the "Alerts" tab which may offer an explanation as why the tape was ejected.

Is the job reported as "successful" or "failed"?

If the jobs are failing with "media inconsistancy" error then the System Event log needs to be checked.

Verify whether Event Ids 7,9 ,11 or 15 are logged by the tape drive.


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[Steven__Monti]

I just wanted to thank everyone for their responses. I will need to look into the configurations of the backup & server further.