Document format for defective tapes

[rahi_raj]

Hi,

im looking for such document / format which describes the procedures and how to maintain the history of defective tapes.

i would appreciate your comments.

thanks,

Rahi

[revarooo]

NetBackup does not capture that information as far as I know.

We do however capture when NetBackup detects issue with a tape in /usr/openv/netbackup/db//media

You could use that.
 

[mph999]

I agree with Revaroo - no such thing in NBU.

The file he mentions will display an entry for a media / tapedrive if an error is detected.  You could also use the bptm logs from the media server.

[rahi_raj]

I mean what to do with the faulty tapes or what is the practice for the damaged tapes before crushing it.Also how to maintain the document for the same.

Thanks,

[revarooo]

Degause the tapes or dispose of them how your company see fit.

As for maintaining a document? This is not part of NetBackup, not sure why you would document faulty tapes? Just dispose of them. If you are seeing lots of faulty tapes then check the media file as I mentioned and you may see tapes having issues in a specific drive - if that's the case you may want to replace a potentially faulty drive that is corrupting your tapes.

[RonCaplinger · Accepted solution]

Rahi_raj,

We created a Volume Pool called "BadMedia".  Whenever we encounter a tape that can't be read or written anymore, we move the volume to the BadMedia pool. 

I was once asked why there were tape serial numbers missing in our media (the tapes were missing since before I started working here), and decided to keep track of all destroyed media in the future by keeping them defined to NetBackup this way.

[rahi_raj]

Thanks, creating badMedia is good idea to keep such records.

[Andy_Welburn]

We used to do a similar thing - helps to keep a complete sequence of media_ids.

Alongside this, we also used to use the 'description' field for the media to give an indication of time/type of 'fault'.