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Tape Ejects During Backup

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
For the past 3 days our backups have been failing due to the tape ejecting and then giving this message:

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Please insert overwritable media into the drive.

Overwritable media includes scratch, blank, and recyclable media. Please note that depending on the current Media Overwrite Protection setting, imported and allocated media may be overwritable as well. Consult the online help for more information on overwritable media.

Respond Yes to acknowledge.
Respond No to retry the operation.
Respond Cancel to cancel the operation
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I have not changed any settings at all since this started happening and I've even tried restarting the services and rebooted the server. It's happening on multiple tapes and at random times. I can't seem to find a similarity between them. Sometimes it ends on one drive, others on another drive. I'm not sure what's going on with this, has anyone seen this problem?
8 REPLIES 8

Ken_Putnam
Level 6
If some data has been written by a job (even only a couple hundred KB, and you get this alert, the tape has filled up (or BackupExec thinks it has)

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
How can I correct this problem then?

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
I tried with a brand new tape and got the same result. I'm going to try taking 37 gigs out of my backup to see if that helps. It has been doing this for a week now and I really NEED to get a full backup going.

Russ_Perry
Level 6
Employee
That alert specifically means that the backup requires another tape to continue the backup job. Supplying another tape will allow the job to complete... or if you decrease the amount of data backed up as you mention, it will be more likely to fit on a single tape.

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
I had previously been able to put more onto the tape. It fails around 130-145gb, never at the same point. Normal backup is around 157gb total. I removed a few folders and put them on an archive tape and I'm currently trying again. I'll know in an hour or so.

Sal_DeAugustino
Level 4
What type of drive are you using and what capacity? I had a SDLT 110/220 GB drive and the same thing would happen on weekly full backups we performed that ranged between 147 GB and 157 GB. The tape was filled to capacity, 220 GB is a assuming a 2:1 compression ratio, once you are over the native capacity of the drive issues like this can happen.

We tried new tapes and still nothing. The final solution was to purchase a LTO 400/800 GB drive. We have not had any problems since.

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
It is a 100/200 LTO-1 tape drive. It's just weird how it started happening all of a sudden with no changes to the backups at all.

Daniel_MacKinno
Level 3
Our backup ran successfully last night after I removed 37 gigs from the backup. It is now 109gb and ran until the end. It's still strange how it happened like that.