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lifetime of tapes

alandavid
Level 4
hi,

How can I decide how long a tape must be used and when to stop using. Does veritas recommend an exact time period or a number of turns to be used? any idea..

alan
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shirmal
Level 5

hi Alan,
There are no hard and fast rules about the lifespans of backup tapes. Ideally you want to get plenty of usage out of the tapes (as they're expensive), but you don't want to risk your data.Backup Exec has a Media Errors report which can be used to see how many errors have been tracked on each piece of media. It's normal to have some errors, but when you see a tape with a significantly larger number of errors than the others, it might be a good idea to stop using it.You can look at the tape's properties in the media view in BE too, which tells you the number of hard (unrecoverable) and soft (recoverable) errors for each tape. Tapes with hard errors are bad, and should probably be retired.
Hope this helps.

---Cheers

shirmal

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CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited
Hi Alan,

No fixed period in which you should be replacing tapes.
The different technologies have different lifetimes, and this depends on the number of times they're written too, how often they're read from, where they're stored (a dusty environment for example would shorten their lifespans) etc. LTO-2 for example fails a lot more regularily than LTO-3.
What I do is normally use them until I see excessive errors on the tapes.
What you can do is read up here on Wikipedia for the approximate lifetimes of the different technologies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

Hope this helps...

Laters!

alandavid
Level 4

Thanks

shirmal
Level 5

hi Alan,
There are no hard and fast rules about the lifespans of backup tapes. Ideally you want to get plenty of usage out of the tapes (as they're expensive), but you don't want to risk your data.Backup Exec has a Media Errors report which can be used to see how many errors have been tracked on each piece of media. It's normal to have some errors, but when you see a tape with a significantly larger number of errors than the others, it might be a good idea to stop using it.You can look at the tape's properties in the media view in BE too, which tells you the number of hard (unrecoverable) and soft (recoverable) errors for each tape. Tapes with hard errors are bad, and should probably be retired.
Hope this helps.

---Cheers

shirmal

alandavid
Level 4

hi,
Are there any specially recomeneded tape brands for veritas?

alan

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited
Hi,

Thought I'd answered the question, but OK...

Alan: Not at all...the type of tape first depends on what hardware you have. LTO-2 tapes will work in an LTO-3 drive for example, but not vice versa. I'd stick with using tapes from your drive's manufacturer to keep the compatibility the same.
You can also look at how much your data is expected to grow. No sense in buying LTO-2 now for example as you're backing up 350GB currently, but you expect that data to grow to 600GB by this time next year. This would mean you're using 2 tapes, meaning double the amount of tapes now needed, and double the cost.
In this case, you would look at LTO-3, and maybe even LTO-4 which has a raw capacity of 800GB and a compressed (best effort) capacity of 1.6TB.
Hope this helps?

Laters!