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Job began to write to a used tape, original Data lost?

adom86
Level 3

Hi

Could I ask about a job I just set off. I accidentally had a tape left in the tape drive which was full but I know the overwrite media was set to 4 weeks or so when the tape was originally filled around 2 months ago. 

I started a new backup job today and it began writing to that tape, I cancelled it as I needed to insert a blank tape instead.

Is the data on the original tape now lost or is there a way to recover it?

Backupexec 2012, Server 2008 R2.

Thanks for any info.

 

2 REPLIES 2

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

A specialist data recovery company might get something back (at a cost, and assuming you were not using encryption, as the format is more or less MTF) however from a Backup Exec point of view that data is lost as soon as the header is overwritten.

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Oh and as you stated the tape was full, the backup set that spanned off that tape onto a further tape will have problems - if it was a file system backup then BE should be able to still restore any complete files that reside on the second tape, if it was a VM or database backup then the data within the spanned set that is on the beginning of that second tape is also unusable (although any later, non-spanned, backup sets added to the second tape should be OK)