Trying to run restore but BE keeps requesting different tape

[garyreilly]

I have Backup Exec 2012 running on a Windows 2008 file server.

Last March, we carried out a one-time backup to archive a number of folders from our file server. These were put on a single tape and the date marked on tape. 

I am now trying to restore one of the folders from that tape tape. I run the restore process as normal, and select the correct date and folder, but BE immediately asks me to insert another tape which, to my mind, has absolutely no connection with this. I've tried an Inventory and Catalog but no improvement.

Any ideas? 

[Colin_Weaver]

Did you acidentally run an incremental backup at the time as if you did the restore selections might show a point in time (synthetic view) of what was on the server with the restore job then requesting earlier tapes in the chain.

If you open the folder you are interested in in the restore selections,  does it show different icons against files that appear to be the same type (as these different icons can indicate if it is part of an incremental chain vs part of the very last backup in that chain. )

[garyreilly]

I'm 99.9% positive I didn't run an incremental job, but a full backup.

Regarding the icons, they all look the same and are consistent throughout. 

[Colin_Weaver]

Hmm OK so the only other option is the full used more than one tape (the content of the catalog XML file might show this, once you have identifed which  one it is - which I believe is displayed somewhere inside the properties of the Backup Set itself.

I guess you don't have the backup job logs (or a backup of the Data folder taken not long afterwards that you can restore and open the BEX*.xml files from.)

[garyreilly]

No don't have the backup logs. I'll see if I can locate the tape it's asking for (we have hundreds, so will mean browsing the barcodes manually) and see what happens. I'm pretty sure all the data was on one tape though, it's only 300gb and we use LTO5 tapes so not sure why it would have went onto a second - or why we didn't bundle them together as we usually do. 

[Colin_Weaver]

if you were appending to the tapes and not overwriting then the first tape selected by the job might not have had enough space and woud have caused a second tape to be used.

[garyreilly]

I had considered that, but there was only ever 1 tape in the drive and the job completed 100%. 

[Colin_Weaver]

Hmm OK if there was only 1 tape in the drive and the backup job completed sucessfully without asking for further tapes then it's possible you have a conflict between what Backup Exec thinks is the media label/identifier and what was written/stuck on the tape itself and you have the wrong tape in the drive for your restore.

This is assuming you have not been copying catalog files around and/or have not used the same tape in a different Backup Exec server since it was written to by this one.