NT Backup

[Chuckster]

Hey Guys,

Bit of a weird one with NT Backup. Every night I backup all my Local Disks to a tape drive, and when viewing the report it says the backup was successful. In fact it says this for every backup I've done.

Well, today was the day when somebody had deleted something by mistake and wanted a folder with all the contents recovered. I inserted last night's backup tape and, lo and behold, NT Backup is showing the media as 'free' and thus no data on it.

Each tape I had inserted into the drive had the date label going back Dec '10/Jan '11 time. Unfortunately I was unable to recover anything off of the tapes.

Error Message "Access Denied to Tape Media" When You Start Windows 2000 Backup
I've followed the above link and it didn't do squat for me.

What I don't understand is how can NT Backup report that the backup was being successful each night but when you load the tape there's nothing on them and gets placed under 'Free Media' under the recovery tab?

These tapes are no more than a year old.

[Dos_Box]

I never trust backup reports and always made a point of randomly checking media when I used tapes. TBH, D2D2T is possibly the most reliable way to go now.

[Chuckster]

Dos_Box, what's your implementation of D2D2T and what software are you using, if any?

[IanIsBaffledAgain]

I feel your pain Chuckster.

My distrust of NTBackup got to such proportions that I was driven to write my own backup utility.

Pardon my ignorance but I'm interested in why people still need tape backup in these days of multi-terabyte HDDs. Am I missing something?

Cheers, Ian.

[Galway]

I made the switch off tape many moons ago. Its all worth checking ANY backup especially once setup and periodically as things can go pair shaped once the brown stuff is let out. Once burned ...

[sparkeh]

Gave up on NTBackup a long time ago due to getting success reports when it wasn't successful and incomprehensible error reports.
Never trust the reports and always test restore a few folders to verify yourself.

I currently use either Acronis Backup & Restore or Backup Exec 2010R2 at my sites. Both good for different reasons. If you want more info give me a shout.