Tape duplication requests wrong media

[gabrever]

Hi,

We are experiencing a weird behaviour with some duplicate jobs in Backup Exec 2014. This ocurrs randombly, and the issue is that the duplicate job requests a media that has nothing to do with what it is supposed to duplicate.

Sometimes the duplicate job starts asking the wrong tape, and sometimes the job starts duplicating the first tape and when it finishes it unloads the first tape, and requests a second one which could be for example a monthly full backup from 2 months ago.

If you insert the wrong tape that it is requesting, it reads it, then it unloads it and automatically mounts the right tape and continuos duplicating.

Any clues?

Thanks

[pkh]

This can happen if the backup set spans two tapes.

[gabrever]

I verified that the duplication job did not just asked the 2 previous monthly tapes (Juliy and August), it duplicated them along with the latest monthly full (September).

It is a SQL DB backup, so I see in the new duplicated tape, 3 backup sets from the same DB, one for August, one for July and the other from September.

[Colin_Weaver]

This can heppen if the original job filled one tape and then used a second (which pkh has already mentioned) - the way to check this is to check the original job logs to confirm the media list. For environments where the backup fits one one tape this may randomly occur if you are using jobs that are set to start as Append - as it might be unpredictable when there is enough free space on the first tape used when you are appending.

It can also happen if a previous duplicate job did not run (or failed) meaning the next duplicate job might try to duplicate 2 (or more) different dates from the same backup definition instead of one - if Backup Exec was set to duplicate data and a set is missed it will keep trying to duplicate that data each time the duplicate runs even if a newer backup from the same job exists. The way to avoid this is use the duplicate last full backup only setting  or make sure you re-run any failed duplicates before further backups run.

[gabrever]

Hi Colin, I checked the duplication history for this particular monthly backup and as you said, the previous 2 duplications did not run as that is why it duplicate them in this schedule along with the last full.

My concern is that the setting to duplicate "last full" is selected...

[Colin_Weaver]

Recommend you log a formal support case

[gabrever]

ok thanks for you help