Not appendable worm media.

[Branatssn]

We are having a problem with backing up to worm media (BE 13).  Everytime a job fails it leaves the "Not appendable (end marker unreadable)" sometimes we might only have used a couple hundred megs of a 1.5 tb LTO4 tape.  I can't erase or overwrite because of it being worm meda.  Is there anyway to manually add this end marker or any other work around so that we can append media to these tapes?  The way things are working now everytime a job fails we waste a tape.

[sksujeet · Accepted solution]

Please diaganose as why the jobs are failing or check if the DRIVE and TAPES are having some issues.

BECAUSE

The bad thing about WORM MEDIA is the serious nature of its use as an archival media. Once the data is written to the tapes, the only way to "erase" it is to destroy the tape physically.

So please try to figure out why the jobs are failing and diagnose the reason behind it as there can't be anything done for the WORM media

[Branatssn]

You would think that BE would at least try to write the end markers even if the job failed as long as it didn't fail due to a tape error.  That seems like an oversight on symantec's part.

[Larry_Fine]

Why are the original jobs failing?  Normall BE does write the file marks, if it can, but there are many things outside of BE's control that may prevent the writing.

[Branatssn]

On this occasion it failed due to the service timing out because the array we are backing up is very old and verry slow.  On the previous tape it failed on some sort of tape error.  We backup almost 500 gigs of data a night and almost 1Tb on the full weekly and have never had this error before or after only on the worm media for some reason.  Storage device "HP 1" reported an error on a request to write data to media. Error reported: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. V-79-57344-34029 - A hardware error occurred.