Tapes randomly disappear from slots in Backup Exec 2014

[Adrian_M]

Hi,

During the course of our backups, tapes will disappear from the slots in our tape libraries (all 3). If you scan the library, they will show up and get marked as unknown media and put in the "Backup Exec and Windows NT Backup Media" media set. Change them to scratch and do an inventory and they are happy again. This gets frustrating as jobs then wait for new tapes to be put in the library when they really are tapes in there but Backup Exec "forgets" they are there.

Anyone seen this before or know of how to troubleshoot this?

Regards,

Adrian

[Marcel_CH]

Hey MASIAlbert,

thank you for your Reply, I am not going crazy then after all.

I am now even more concerned about this because in my naivety I presumed that the Data is still on the Tapes but I would "only" be forced to catalog them again if I want to access the Data.

I would very much like to have a statement from Symantec about this:

- does the process of flagging the Medias "expired" actually delete the content of the Tapes or rather "only" the media ID in the BE-Database so it appears empty.

After all, moving a Tape to Scratch does not actually delete the content of the Tape. Or am I wrong about that?

Again, this is a nightmare. We backup 38 TB over the weekend. We do not have the timeslot to repeat this during the week just because BE gets "confused". 

[MASIAlbert]

Hi Marcel_CH,

No, you're certainly not going crazy.  

I don't know if tape storage works like disk storage, where when you delete a file, it simply marks it as overwriteable in a header, rather than actually writing 0's to every bit, so I too would like clarification from Symantec on this.  Actually, I'm pretty sure it doesn't 0 out the data because I've run a long erase before (which is actually deleting all the data) and it takes hours. 

But, what we experienced is that the tapes that were just written to were shown as "Blank" media when I re-scanned them.  I don't know if data is recoverable from a tape in this condition (without sending it off to some specialist) especially if it is part of a group of tapes that were used for a single job.  How does it work if one of them is changed to "Blank"?  I would like clarification from Symantec on this point as well.

I have not tried re-cataloging a deleted-as-expired tape to see if the data is still accessible.  Again, I'm pretty sure the data is still there, but is it accessible by Backup Exec's restore processes?  Do I have to catalog it to make to accessible again, or will that not work?

To be safe, I've been babysitting the backups and re-running any jobs that suffer from this.

Best,

Albert

[Colin_Weaver]

A tape will always need a backup operation to overwrite it in order to erase the date, as such just going expired won't erase the data, but running a backup job after the expired status occurs might.

Disk based backups (for online disks) do erase expired backup sets in the backgound in order to more effectively manage disk space.

[Marcel_CH]

I have opened a new thread because I believe there is more behind it than "only" radomly dissapearing medias

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/dlm-and-be2014-sp1

[Min_WPT]

I disabled DLM in registry until this issue is fixed.   It appears to work,  last weekend,  no weekend tapes disappeared from slots.   We do not have disk based backup disabling DLM has little impact.

Set registry key CheckExpiredMediaIntervalMinutes and CheckReclaimSpaceIntervalMinutes to 0