Veritas keeps ejecting the media!!!!

[Penny_Reed]

I'm not sure what's going on, but when I come in in the morning the backup didn't run and there is a screen up that wants media to be inserted. I had a tape in the drive before leaving for the day the night before!! For some reason Veritas is ejecting the tape!!!!

In the media properties, I notice that all but one of my tapes is either NOT APPENDABLE or infinite do not overwrite!

I have tried changing this to overwritable for all my tapes, but it's not changing the properties for these tapes.

I think that's why veritas is ejecting the tapes when it's time to run the backup job. What can I do to fix this?

[Ken_Putnam]

Has anything been written to the tape at all?
If you stick the tape back in, and hit OK, does the job start writting?

[Penny_Reed]

Yes the job starts when I put the tape back in, I don't know if it actually writes to the tape though. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of being able to run the job during the day while people are actively writing to the database, not to mention the performance hit it would take doing a backup during the day.

[Ken_Putnam]

if this is a standalone drive, before you for the evening, run an inventory against the mounted tape. if the info displays in blue, the job should run. If it comes back in black, the tape volume is protected. you can then drag it to the scratch media set and the job should run that evening

If the tape shows in black, try setting the OPP down one or two days for the media set

[Joshua_Small]

Check your Veritas alert history for "unrecognizable media".

If you are getting that, forget it, it's a Veritas problem and there is no solution.

[Penny_Reed]

That seems to have worked for today, I'll do this on my other tapes too. It's odd why I suddenly have to do this where I didn't have too before.

Thanks for your help

[Ken_Putnam]

if your backups started going beyond midnight, the OPP was probably one day too long. And once this started, if the OPP was 7 days, then it would have just continued.

if you overwrite the same tape on the same night every week, try setting your OPP to 6 days instead of 7

[Penny_Reed]

My backups do go beyond midnight, but I'm setting OPP for hours now.

My problem is NOT resolved. It did it again!!! I inventoried the tape and it was "overwritable" (came back blue), the tape was in the drive when I left for the day.

When I came in this morning, Veritas has an "Insert overwritable media into the drive" and the tape is EJECTED!

There's nothing in the event viewer that states anything was wrong, like the service stopped unexpectidly. The backup job monitor is sitting with a status of "Queued" as if it's waiting for the job to run as of 10 PM last night!!!!!

This is SERIOUS! There's nothing indicating why the tape got ejected or what went wrong!!!

[Ken_Putnam]

Was anything written to the tape at all?

You may be filling the tape up. Remember that 2:1 compression is more marketing than enginnering, so don't expect to get 40 GB on a 20/40 tape. I usually use about 1.3:1 as a rule of thumb. on a 20/40 tape that would be about 26 GB

[Penny_Reed]

Nothing ever got written to the tape, the job status was "Queueing", but the job never ran. The tape ejected itself so Veritas was waiting for the tape to be inserted before it would run.

If I were to push the tape into the drive, the job would then run. BUT I can't run this during business hours as it would cause poor performance.

[Ken_Putnam]

This may be more playing than you want to do, but if you cancel the job in the morning and do another inventory on the same tape volume, what has changed in the tape header?Message was edited by:
Ken Putnam