cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

WORM tapes causing down drives

LT2013
Level 4

I recently had to convert to WORM tapes for compliance reasons, and I had the following situation...

A "bad" recursive copy command was creating the same file in nesting directories, that we are backing up to tape (the storage is a dedupe appliance, so it never ran out of space).

Once I saw the issue, I cancelled the job. It have already written ~ 60 TBs to WORM tapes. So NB runs its cleanup and puts all those tapes back into the pool. Problem is they are unusable. So as NB is mounting the tapes, and can't write to them, its also downing the drives (as well as freezing the tapes).

Wondering if there is any way to curtail remounting of WORM tapes after a failed job. I've since put in a check for down drives every 5 minutes, but I'm wondering if there is a better way.

Then env is NBU 7.5.0.6, Linux media and master.

 

thanks

5 REPLIES 5

GulzarShaikhAUS
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

AS far as I know WORM tapes once written cannot be reused. Please check with your tape vendor. Though you might be able to use the non-written area on the tape. Its really awkward but its how it is.

quebek
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Hello

WORM - Write Once, Read Many...

I concur with SymGuy-IT on this...

So you need to buy additional WORM tapes...

LT2013
Level 4

I understand what WORM means. The issue for which I am looking for some guidance is that NBU is trying to re-use WORM tapes that were used in a failed backup (tape might not even have much data on it). From Media Manager NB is reporting 0 images on the tape, so I assume that when NB tried to re-use the tape (even though it might be virtually empty), its trying to write to the first header, and subsequently getting a media error because it can't overwrite that (to be expected with WORM). But NB is also downing drives as a result of too many tape media errors. I'm not trying to figure out a way to re-use the tapes.

I'm trying to see if I can prevent NB from trying to re-use tape(s) associated with a failed backup, and prevent the downing of drives.

revarooo
Level 6
Employee

How about making sure that once the backup has run on these tapes they are moved outside of any active POOLS so another backup does not try to write to them too (and fail).

 

You want drives to go down if it cannot write to a tape as any bad/faulty tapes can and will break tape drives if attempted to many times.

quebek
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Have you seen this??

NetBackup compares the first four characters of the volume pool name to determine if it is a volume pool that contains WORM media. The first four characters must be WORM.
To disable the volume pool name verification, create the following touch file on the media server of the WORM drive:
On Windows:
install_path\netbackup\db\config\DISABLE_WORM_POOLCHECK
On UNIX:
/usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/DISABLE_WORM_POOLCHECK

Note the following cases:
■ If the drive contains WORM media and the media is in a WORM volume pool, NetBackup writes the media as WORM.
■ If the drive contains WORM media and the media is not in a WORM volume pool, NetBackup freezes the media.
■ If the drive contains standard media and the media is in a WORM volume pool, NetBackup freezes the media.
■ If the drive contains Quantum media that has never been used or all of its NetBackup images have expired, NetBackup uses the media.

 

Taken from NBU admin guide vol 1.