"Insert Overwritable Media" errors

[Steve_Glass]

I am using Veritas 9.1 as my backup solution for my Windows server. I have a robotic drive that holds 6 tapes. My current scheme is one tape for every day of the work week and a cleaning tape on Saturday. Every week, I swap out my Friday tape and take the one I pulled home with me. I inventory the Friday slot (slot 5) and everything is good.

I recently replaced all of my tapes in the drive. In the "Devices" tab, on the left side of the screen, I clicked on "Import" and ran that for each tape in the library. After that, I electronically labeled each tape in Veritas and then ran an inventory for each tape in the library. My first week of backups on the new tapes went without a hitch. However, now I'm into my second week of using the tapes and every morning so far this week I have come in to find an error saying that I need to insert overwritable media into the drive.

If I look at each individual tape in the "Devices" tab, in the "Overwrite Protected Until" area, it says "Overwritable" and the text is blue in color. I've checked the overwrite tabs on the tapes themselves and they're all set to overwrite.

I've re-imported and re-inventoried the tapes and still no luck. What could be my issue? Any ideas?

[Steve_Glass]

This is the error message I get...

[Keith_Langmead]

Try moving the tapes from the current media set into the Scratch Media set and see if they work then. Try running the inventory on the entire library rather than the specific slot, so you can confirm all the other tapes are where they are supposed to be.

[Steve_Glass]

All tapes are in the Scratch Media Set. I just verified that. I also (just now) moved all of my old tapes from "Media Set 1" to "Retired Media." I didn't do that before. Now, all my current tapes are in "Scratch Media" and all other media is in "Retired Media."

Since I hadn't moved any of my old media out, could this have been my problem? It was still looking for the old tapes?

[Keith_Langmead]

Wouldn't have thought so, I'm sure we've had old media we've stopped using and not retired without any problems in the past, but you never know. Have to see if it makes a difference tonight. All in all it sounds to me like you've done everything right, so I can't think why it wouldn't be working.

[michael_chan]

I would try running the daily backup job on each tape just to have BE write something to the tape. If the job runs, you only need to let it write a few kb to the tape and then cancel it.

Also, did you try manually moving the tapes to the media set the job is configured to use?

[Steve_Glass]

Ok, still no go on the backups. It still tells me to insert overwritable media into the drive. Yes, I have moved the tapes to the correct media set. Still nothing. Not sure what to think at this point... I'll try a manual backup and see if that works.

[Steve_Glass]

Just tried to run a backup manually and it won't let me do it either. Looks like it starts, and then at the very end of the backup, it throws the error about inserting overwritable media.

[Ken_Putnam]

Sounds like the tape is filling up and it is asking for another to finish the job.

[Steve_Glass]

I had thought that myself. But I went back and looked at my backup history and the backup jobs a couple weeks ago that went fine were larger than what I'm trying to backup now. I even took some unimportant things out of the backup selection for good measure. Nothing. Just keeps asking for overwritable media.

[Ken_Putnam]

How much is written to tape before the "Insert ..." prompt comes up?

[Steve_Glass]

looks like about 48gig. Using 36/72 4mmDAT tapes. I've had 50+ gig backups go without a hitch, so I highly doubt it's backup size. But it does look like it starts to write to the tapes, it just gets hung up and I'm not sure why. I have the latest firmware on the tape drive itself and everything seems to check ok when I run TapeRX.

In the Job History log, here's what I have. Mind you, I have to cancel the backup job when I come in in the morning because it's been hung up for about 10 hours and the status is "queued."

Backup - LASERSERVER03\SHAREPOINT The media operation was terminated by the user.
Error reading file data.
Media mount failed.
User canceled a Physical Volume Library operation.


This is the error both in the Windows Event Log also in Veritas:

Backup Exec Alert: Library Insert
(Server: "LASERSERVER03") (Job: "Monday") Please insert overwritable media into the robotic library using the import command.Message was edited by:
Steve Glass

[Ken_Putnam]

OK

Remember that 2:1 compression is marketing glitz, not engineering promise. Whatever you get with you data is whatever you get. And it may not be the same from week to week, since different data compresses differently.


48 GB on a 36/72 tape is about 1.33":1, which is right about what I use as a realworld estimate (1.2-1.3:1)

[Steve_Glass]

well, I made a couple changes and ran a cleaning tape through a few times and we'll see what happens. One thing I do notice is that I constantly get a "Cleaning Media has experied" message, even though I've put in a fresh cleaning tape. I also get a message on the LCD of the robotic drive itself that says "Cleaning Required."

I will see what happens when the backup runs tonight.Message was edited by:
Steve Glass

[Steve_Glass]

For now, I'm going to mark this issue as "resolved."

After my last post, I started getting "cyclic redundancy check" errors after writing only a gig or two to the tapes at night. Decided to swap out the robotic drive for a new one and everything has been running fine so far with no errors and no changes to my Veritas setup. Looks like the drive was the culprit all along.

Thanks for the suggestions and help. I've learnd a lot more on how Veritas works through this process. Hopefully, now that I've found this forum, I can check it from time to time and help brainstorm issues with others.