Inventory problems with BE 8.6 with Dell Power Vault & 72 DAT tapes

[jamesd3rd]

We have been using BE 8.6 for quite a while and haven't had the need to move to a more up to date version.  I have some questions regarding inventory and catalog.  It's my understanding that BE is supposed to be one of the more robust and 'go-to' backup solutions.  But we have found it to be very non-intuitive and aggravating.  For example, the whole issue related to inventory.  The purpose if inventory is to be able to catalog a tape and see its contents.  Why isn't this something that is done as soon as a tape is inserted?  Why is it something that needs to be done manually?  When I put in a tape, I expect to see what's on it and what the label is as soon as I put it in.

We were trying to restore a file yesterday and went through 7 tapes and every single time, the inventory job said the tape was blank.  That's not possible.  Why would this happen?  As a result, the tape could not be cataloged.  We only run two types of backups.  We do a full back up every Friday and a differential mon-thurs.  We only swap the tapes when they are full.  We do not swap tapes between job types.  We have never inventoried a new tape when it was put in the drive under the assumptioin that BE does it for us.  It appears that was a wrong assumption.  If there are 8 tapes in rotation, each replaced ONLY after the previous one is full, does the replacement still need to have an inventory job run on it regardless if it is new or old?  Does the overwrite protection need to be removed on all old tapes so the backup can be done when it comes up in the rotation?  With the protection set to 'infinite' wouldn't it be impossible to overwrite a tape coming up in the rotation even if it hasn't been used for say 6-8 weeks?

Since we never performed an actual inventory, would it better to take all the tapes, erase them, re-inventory and recreate the media labels and start over?


Thanks.

[teiva-boy]

8.6, really?  

There was 9, 10, 11d, 12, 12.5, 2010, and now 2010 R2.  11d came out in 2004 or so, 8.6 sounds like it was early Veritas days around 2000-2001!

That said, are you sure it's not a hardware issue with the tapes and/or drive?  DAT is not the most reliable media...  In fact far from it in my experience.  I've run into more bad DAT tapes than I can count..

Generally I schedule an inventory to run daily.  BE doesnt do this by default, and I'm unsure if that version even does.  Also, the default catalog entry value was pretty low in those days, something like 30 days?  

[Ken_Putnam]

 If there are 8 tapes in rotation, each replaced ONLY after the previous one is full, does the replacement still need to have an inventory job run on it regardless if it is new or old? 

Yes.  Inventory is the only way to tell BackupExec that the media has been changed in a stand-alone drive.  (If you have a library/loader and have enabled bar-codes you can run a scan rather than an inventor)

Does the overwrite protection need to be removed on all old tapes so the backup can be done when it comes up in the rotation?

If OPP and APP are managed properly, you should not need to do anything to  reuse tapes.

 With the protection set to 'infinite' wouldn't it be impossible to overwrite a tape coming up in the rotation even if it hasn't been used for say 6-8 weeks?

Yes, with OPP set to infinite, you would never be able to overwrite a tape without intervention

Since we never performed an actual inventory, would it better to take all the tapes, erase them, re-inventory and recreate the media labels and start over?

You will probably have to, since Backup Exec has probabluy written the same media id to each tape.

You may be able to get data off those tapes by shutting down all BackupExec services, renaming the \Catalogs directory to catalogs.save and then restarting the services.  A new \catalogs directory should be created.  then try the inventory and catalog again

[Larry_Fine]

re: The purpose if inventory is to be able to catalog a tape and see its contents

Not exactly.  The purpose of the inventory job is for BE to do a quick read of the tape header in order to identify the tape and determine if this is a tape that BE already has in its database.  The purpose of a catalog job is to re-read or re-index the files on a tape that has already been inventoried.  An inventory job should be less than 3 minutes per tape.  A catalog job may take hours.

If you are still attempting to restore files, please post more details about your catalog error messages.

[Ken_Putnam]

Not exactly.  The purpose of the inventory job is for BE to do a quick read of the tape header in order to identify the tape and determine if this is a tape that BE already has in its database



Thanks, Larry, I missed that part of the OP