Removable media going offline requires a restart of services

[MartinW]

Hi,

Long time reader, 1st time poster.

I manage a number of sites where we encourage the clients to run BE as a backup solution. 've noticed that there are some recurring issues, across multiple sites, where the problem can be only resolved by restarting services or, for some, rebooting the server itself (VSS issue)

If I can start with this problem perhaps there is a more permenant solution. The example I am looking at right now is on a BE2014 on Win2008R2 with a pool of USB drives rotated nightly labelled Mon-Friday

Periodically, BE reports that the media is offline and the backup cannot run.

I can see the USB drive in explorer. I can unplug and re-plug it, try it in a different USB port, replace the cable. I can set the device online inside BE but as soon as I try and catalog or backup to the device, it immediately goes offline again.

However, if I replace the device with the next days backup, it seems to pick it back up again. Alternatively, if I restart the media services it will detect the original device again and continue for another week or so.

This is not isolated to this site and whilst restarting the services works it means a days backup missing and also a manual intervention.

Is this a known problem or is there something I can do to fix it on a more permenant basis?

Many thanks,

Martin

[pkh]

It could be that the diskid of your USB drives are the same.  See this blog

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/changing-diskid

[MartinW]

I checked Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday ID's and they were all different. Tuesday worked fine, Wednesday was the problem backup and Thursday was the one I put in to test if I had to restart the services. While I was looking at the ID's I put Wednesday's back in and it's now working again as normal.

So, the summary solution could be:
Tuesday backup worked fine

Wednesday media crashed with media offline

Replace Wednesday with Tuesday and back to Wednesday but no difference

Replace Wednesday with Thursday and back to Wednesday and problem fixed

OR restart services as this also fixed the problem

I like the idea of the ID's causing an issue but I'm not sure that is the case. What I have done is started to now log all the days that the media is offline by site. Perhaps I will see a common 'day' which presents a problem for each site then ensure it isn't a random drive issue.

If anyone has anothe suggestion I can try but for now I'll look at gathering some more data to try and hone it in,

Thanks, Martin

[maurijo]

Can you check if windows is messing up the drive letters ? We had that issue with one of our customers. Manually assigning them once fixed it.

[MartinW]

Hi Maurijo,

Thanks for the reply. I had checked the disks in Disk Manager and they had assigned a/the drive letter that I would have expected to see. If I get the same problem again I'll manually assign one and see if that helps.

Thanks,

Martin

[pkh]

Although it is worth a try, BE does not track disks by drive letters so this should not be the cause of the problem.  BE tracks disks by their diskids which is why I asked you earlier to verify that you do not have disks with the same diskids.

[maurijo]

Pkh, I know that it "should" not track this by drive letter...but I am speaking out of experience here...

Maybe the diskids had something to do with it as well but manually assigning the letters helped me fix my customer's problem.