Greetings.
Let me preface this post by saying: forgive me if I ask questions that have already been answered on this forum, but I did search thoroughly prior to posting, and couldn't find anything that incorporated all of the errors I'm seeing, and in the pattern I'm seeing them. Of course, I'm not immune to mistake, so if the answers ARE already out there, kindly point me in the right direction and I'll be on my way.
My Setup
Backup Server
HP ProLiant DL320 G5p*
- 4GB RAM
- Xeon X3210 Proc
- Win Serv 2008 R2 x64
- 2 x 1.5TB SATA HDDs in RAID 1 (embedded HP RAID controller, which is actually a rebranded Adaptec controller)
- LSI Ultra320 SCSI 2000 series card (used for tape drive)
*This server was rebuilt at the beginning of February and all software was reinstalled and patched to the latest level. I do all of my B2D jobs to local disk storage.
Backup Software
- Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R2 SP1
Backup Exec patched to latest level using Live Update.
Tape Drive
SCSI terminator is being used.
My Issue
I seem to have developed a weird problem duplicating my nightly B2D jobs to tape. I have several B2D jobs running every night, but the tapes are swapped only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The B2D jobs are completing successfully every night, but the first dupe (to tape) job fails at an indeterminate byte count every time. Sometimes the job fails at 52GB, sometimes 56GB. When the job fails I get error code E00084F9, and the following message in the job log:
Duplicate
An unknown error occured on device "TANDBERG".
V-79-57344-34029 - a hardware error occured.
A selection on device \\EXCHSERVER.blah.com\Microsoft Information Store\Database1 was skipped because of previous errors with the job.
A selection on device \\EXCHSERVER.blah.com\Microsoft Information Store\Database2 was skipped because of previous errors with the job.
A selection on device \\EXCHSERVER.blah.com\Microsoft Information Store\Public Folders was skipped because of previous errors with the job.
Now, I also see:
0xe00084f9 - A communications failure has occurred between the Backup Exec job engine and the remote agent.
Final error category: Resource Errors
This confuses me because this is a dupe to tape job. Are dupe to tape jobs really utilizing the remote agent? Once the B2D job finishes successfully, shouldn't the dupe to tape job write from the B2D [folder] to the tape, without the need for a remote agent? The B2D jobs don't give any indication as to any errors, or previous errors; nothing at all in fact.
Once the initial dupe job errors out, it causes the end marker to become unreadable, and thus all subsequent appending duplicate jobs to fail in the process.
Which leads me to believe that this could be related to a hardware failure with my tape drive. The drive is relatively "new", it was purchased in May of last year, and has completed jobs successfully in the past. I have cleaned it numerous times, swapped SCSI cables, swapped terminators, uninstalled/reinstalled SYMANTEC tape drivers, and even ran the tracer.exe tool Backup Exec provides in hopes that I could identify an error with the unit.
Before I reach out to Tandberg and attempt to have the unit replaced, I wanted to reach out to the Symantec community to ensure that I was doing all I could to troubleshoot the software side of things.
Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
