tape whack a mole

[jag2]

Hi,

All was well then one day I would get a notification email to insert overwritable media.  The gal that does the tapes said that she put a tape in.  I noticed that there were two tapes labelled LTO6-010.  LTO6-009 is no longer in All media so I labelled one of the tapes LTO6-009 and guess what?  If I eject that tape (that does so happen to be physically marked LTO6-009 and insert the tape that is physically marked LTO6-010 and do an inventory, it now shows up as LTO6-009. It is as though the low level tape id has somehow been made the same (I have zero knowledge about how that works I just know that there is some kind of marker that supposedly cannot be changed via software but I could be incorrect there).

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

This is a rare issue that we believe is down to the orginal format of the tapes when new. We have seen a very, very small number of customers report something similar and didn't really get to the root cause. As far as I know the solution was:

1) Retire and delete both tapes inside Backup Exec.

2) Use the tools from the tape drive vendor to erase and reformat both tapes (at the lowest possible level)

3) Inventory (possibly label if not using barcodes) using Backup Exec and write some test (backup) data to both tapes and then swap them around a few times (with inventories in between) just to check that they are now being seen as different tapes.

Of course if these tapes contain data needed to be retained for possible restore then you may have to wait for a suitable date before you can do this (in that case I'd stop using the tapes until you have been able to try the above steps)

[jag2]

Thanks,

I decided to just retire them period.  New ones on order.  I've been using BE a long time and have never had this problem before so I thought it was a rare item when there were no replies yesterday so Thanks for that!

Cheers