I need an alert if no tape was inserted before the job runs

[dbartlett]

Hi all,

Had very little luck with Symantec support on this, they didn't seem to be able to grasp what I was saying.  I'm using BE 2014.

We run our backups on each of our servers at 10pm each night, we email our local based IT co-ordinators in the morning to let them know what tape they need to insert (and to remind them to insert the tape).  However fairly often they forget to put the tape in..............and the backup fails, the problem is by that time everyone has gone home and it's too late to do anything about it.

What I'd really like is an auto inventory run every day at say 4:30pm, and if no tape has been inserted an email alert is sent to me, then I can call the local offiec and remind them about the tape.  This would be alot quicker than having to manually go to every server to check.

Is this possible?  Surely this is something which alot of people would want and find helpfull in avoiding failed backups due to users forgetting the tapes.

I'd welcome any thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks

[Colin_Weaver]

BE does not have  an inbuilt way to do this as the backup jobs has to start to find out that the media it wants to use is not available.

I belive that in the past some customers, with similar remote staffing, have used whether or not an inventory job identifies a tape to generate the alert. However this may need some scripting as well as having the scheduled inventory as I don't think the inventory job will actually fail.

I suppose you could always mail the inventory job log to the IT service desk and have soemone read it and pick up the phone if no tape inserted.

[dbartlett]

I thought the job log doesn't have the media label within it though?

I'm so suprised that this isn't something alot of companies would want. 

[Artegic]

It is something a lot of companies would want. It's just not something that backup software products would provide. (SCNR)

More to the point: I've asked for this in the past with a different product and have first been asked why I would want something like that and then been told I should do things differently so that the need wouldn't arise. It seems such a feature would be so difficult to implement that it's easier to try talking customers out of wanting it.

[Colin_Weaver]

OK no idea if the job log for the inventory would show the name.

However if you schedule an inventory and then schedule some kind of BEMCLIpowershell script you may be able to send the result from

Get-BEMedia |where-object{$_.LocationName-like "<tape drive name>"}

to an e-mail address

Notes:

<tape drive name> Must match the visible name of the drive in the storage section of the Backup Exec console

if you don't run an inventory juist before the command then it is possible that the command will return what Backup Exec  last knew was in the drive and not what might curretly be in the drive

I haven't actually used that command with a tape drive - it did show me media labels when used against a Backup 2 Disk

You should make sure that a failure of the inventory job also gets alerted as if the inventory job fails to run, then the result of the BEMCLI command should be treated as inaccurate

The command won't work with a tape library as the tapes would not be in the drive they would be in the slots

You will probably need a 3rd party mechanism to get the result to an e-mail recipient

[dss_thinktank]

I know this is not what you are asking for but in case backup fits to one tape, job definition can be tuned so that it will not eject the tape automatically. In case operators forget to change the tape before next scheduled backup, there at least is some tape in the tape drive for backup to use. This is not an optimal solution because it will in this case overwrite previous valid backup.