No backup scheduled job completed

[Omar_Cantoro]

Hello, i'm new to this program - i just "imported" a new customer and he has a Win2003r2 with BackupExec10.1.

Well, since a couple of weeks program just cannot complete scheduled process.

Process was created by another consultant and it worked fine.

BE just reaches the time out period for completing the process after 12 hours - it's like he's waiting for something, but i have no message.

Don't know if this is a coincidence, but as far i can remember, it all started since we changed old tapes with new ones.

Maybe they should be prepared somehow?

Please anyone can help me telling me more about procedures to plan a scheduled backup?

thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

Are you doing anything to the new tapes, or just putting them in the Drive\Libarary?

Is anything backed up at all?

Are there any active alerts?

[Omar_Cantoro]

I didn't anything to tapes, just put them into drive device...

process seems to start "counting" amount of MB to backup, and then hangs when complete to count.

i can see an alert saying to insert a writable tape...

[Ken_Putnam]

i can see an alert saying to insert a writable tape...

That's the problem then.

When you change tapes you need to inventory the drive/slots. If your jobs are overwrite, and the tapes appear in black after the inventory, you need to drag the tape to the scratch media set, since BackupExec has the tape flagged as not overwritable (Overwritable tapes will appear in Blue)

[Omar_Cantoro]

thanks for your reply.

I can see a lot of media under "all media" (I have to deal also with those ugly translations since software is in Italian lang).

Same media are in "off line media" - I can't distinguish anymore which are new and which are old ones.

Under the column "add data until" (or something like this in english) many media are marked as "full", so no data can be appended to this.

what would be if i drag ALL the tape from off-line to scratch? Would i reset situation and overwrite all the tapes?

thanks for your patience...

:)

[Ken_Putnam]

Are your jobs Overwrite or Append?

If they are append, be aware that eventually the tapes will fill up, and you'll have to provied a scratch/overwritable tape for the job to continue

How long do you need to keep your data?,  how many tapes do you have?

You can reset the OPP Overwrite Protection Period for the media set so that they will  be overwritable when you want to re-use them

For now, yes - you should be able to drag as many "off-line" tapes to scratch as you need to get the backups running again

[Omar_Cantoro]

Ok, i moved some of last media to scratch, we'll see tonight if it will work.

Meanwhile:

actually the scheduled job is set to overwrite.

We have 6 tapes, one for each day of week, so data should be kept for 1 week, after that i need to use that media again, overwriting what i saved previous week.

How can i reset OPP?

Thank you

[Ken_Putnam]

On the media tab, right click the media set\properties

if you re-use the tapes on the dame day each week, use a 6 day OPP not 7

[Omar_Cantoro]

Sorry it took long to reply.

Ok, draggin' all the media on "scratch" didn't work. BE always asks for a writable media... and then process times out since i set to end after 14 hours...

Now, i'd like somehow to "reset" all, using tapes as they were new.

It's getting a little bit urgent, since we don't have backups since 3 weeks now.

Thank you.

[Ken_Putnam]

If fyou re-label each volume, that is functionally the same as a quick erase

[Omar_Cantoro]

i went phisically in front of server (we manage it remotly usually). I found the tape out the device, while the person who change tapes at night told that yesterday he did it successfully.

So tape was in, this mornig was out and BE asked for a writable media. I've re-inserted the tape and the job started... how can it be?

Now I'm trying again with a new tape first, before erasing existing ones.

I did this exact sequence:

1) inserted a new blank tape into device

2) created a new test job, including some dummy folder

3) started job

4) noticed everything was fine, the tape was automatically catalogated as 4M000015 in "media set 1"

So, keeping 4M000015 in device, i started the job scheduled for nights manually. And it seems it's working.

I can't wait it to finish (about 5 hours)... we'll see how it will be tonight, when the same job has to start automatically...

Thank you

[Ken_Putnam]

If the tape was ejected, but the job startded when you pushed it back in, sounds like when the job started,. BackupExec thought that the tape was still protected, but in th morning accepted is as overwritable

If this happens again, check to see how much data has been written to the tape before it asks for an overwritable tape.