Backup suddenly failing

[marsdenprimary]

Hi,

We've had our daily backup tape running fine for a long time until after the school holidays. Now it keeps saying 'Job exceeded its maximum runtime' and it's cancelling the job. When I come in the morning the tape is ejected. We're using Backup Exec.

Any thoughts on how to resolve this? We've had a few days without backup now and i'm getting scared...

[2097]

Hi,

We've had our daily backup tape running fine for a long time until after the school holidays. Now it keeps saying 'Job exceeded its maximum runtime' and it's cancelling the job. When I come in the morning the tape is ejected. We're using Backup Exec.

Any thoughts on how to resolve this? We've had a few days without backup now and i'm getting scared...

probably getting stuck on something . Check the full logs , it will tell you the name of the task/service/file that is getting it stuck .

2097

[marsdenprimary]

probably getting stuck on something . Check the full logs , it will tell you the name of the task/service/file that is getting it stuck .

2097

Cheers for this- i'm getting this message now:

Media is unrecognized.

The media in drive 'CERTANCE 2' is written in an unrecognized format. Erase the media to make it usable.

This is not good... why would it do this all of a sudden?

[theriver]

Have you got a flashing LED on the front panel of the tape drive? One of our servers used to behave like this if the drive needed cleaning. A quick zap with the cleaning tape and all was back to normal. Also, have you tried a different tape?

[marsdenprimary]

Have you got a flashing LED on the front panel of the tape drive? One of our servers used to behave like this if the drive needed cleaning. A quick zap with the cleaning tape and all was back to normal. Also, have you tried a different tape?

I did give it a clean but i'll give it another spin i think. Getting a different error now though after replacing the tape and starting it manually. It did back up data at least but failed with the following error after 6 hours:

"Error category : Backup Media ErrorsError : e00084ca - The data being read from the media is inconsistent."

I'm going to clean it, swap the tape again and see how it gets on tonight. Hopefully it's sorted itself out...

[theriver]

Good luck!

As a follow up to that, I'd say that I've a couple of times come up against a tape drive that needs a couple of cleans to get back up and running - so this is a good thing to try next.

Have you got a brand new tape you can try with? Could it just be that your tape stock is past its prime?

If all this fails, is the drive under warranty? Have you got someone you can call to troubleshoot it?