Restore not happening: Is it the tape or...

[D--ops]

HI,

My setup is:

NetBackup 6.0mp4 running on linux enterprise 4.4 32bit.

After some research on this forum I still need your help with this issue.

I am getting this error message on a job, with a certain tape (000010).

08/08/2007 15:35:27 - positioning 000010 to file 341
08/08/2007 15:35:58 - Warning bptm (pid=8493) cannot locate on drive index 0, locate scsi command failed, key = 0x8, asc = 0x0, ascq = 0x5
08/08/2007 15:37:28 - Error bptm (pid=8493) ioctl (MTFSF) failed on media id 000010, drive index 0, Input/output error (bptm.c.6445)

Now I'd like to know if it's the tape or the a data base trouble or...

Many thanx in advance,

Dany Mc Donald.

[sdo]

Bad tape.

Freeze it.

Wait for it to expire.

Unfreeze it.

Destroy it.

[Omar_Villa]

is this error over the same media tape in different drives? or different tapes over the same drive? if is the first case I agree with destroying the media, otherwise u should check your drive, clean it and verify that there no missmatches between the tpconfig, tpautoconf and vmglob, even if this 3 are good, you can call your vendor to came in and check the device.

Regards

[Stumpr2]

check the size_data_buffers setting

[D--ops]

 Thanks for the info!

I unfreezed it and relaunch the restore job, with the same error message.

But before destruction...can I recuperate the data in any way?

Thanks,

Dany

[sdo]

All existing images should be okay to read until they expire.  Why go duplicating or restoring and backing up again.  The bad portion of the tape is after all the good portions that contain your data.

Just freeze it.  Wait for it to pass it's expiry date.  When the media has passed it's expiry date, then eject it, if not already.  Once ejected, unfreeze it, and it it will automatically expire and is normally automatically returned to scratch (hence the eject so that it can't be reused).  Then move it to a (new?) pool named something like BAD-MEDIA.  Then destroy it.

[D--ops]

 Hi, Thanks for your imput!

The situation has evolve. This tape seems to have migrated  from one pool to another...

It was always in the archive pool (infinite retention) and for an unknown reason yet, has been use for back-up pool. (2 weeks retention).

So I still need to retrive data that is on the tape. Simply if the tape is not totally gone bad how can I restore some data from it?

Many thanks in advance.

Dany

[sdo]

If the media has been overwriten then you'll need some really skilled forensic companies to be able to read the residual magnetism.

If the tape has only been used a bit, then you'll probably need to write your own code to read past the end-of-volume markers and somehow decode the NetBackup/tar format/layout - up until the next start of file marker.  After that tar should be able to read the data I think (but I believe this is only possible if the data has not been multi-plexed - I'm not sure).

In short.  No, you won't be able to recover the data using normal methods.

[Stumpr2]

you will not be able to access the data unless extraordinary measures are undertaken. Consider the tape useless unless you want to spens really BIG bucks ot maybe have a university that wants to hack at it.