Backups

[DSapseid]

I am having some problems here with my backups not working properly. I am using 'symantec backup exec 10d' and when it gets roughly 510gb through it spits the tape out and asks for writeable media!!! Even though there is another 290gb left on that tape?!?!

 

I have tried running the backup manually to see if there was a problem with the scheduled job and that did the same thing, i am going to try it with a brand new tape tonight and see if that helps.

 

Has anyone else got any thoughts about what could be going wrong???

 

I also need to redo the backup jobs i think so if anyone has got a dummys guide to redoing the backup jobs i would appreciate it as i have never had to do them before(current backup jobs done by former employee).

 

Cheers

 

Dan

[plexer]

Are the allready backup sets on the tape?

 

If there are and it also has backup protection period set to be quite long it is only using the amount of free tape space available.

 

You can change the overwrite protection level to none.

 

Ben

[DSapseid]

Ben

 

Thanks for the speedy response. My overwrite protection was set to medium, i have now changed it to none and am going to try with brand new tape this eve.

[plexer]

With a brand new tape overwrite protection shouldn't have any effect as it doesn't have any existing data on it.

 

What tapes are they? and are you working on the native or compressed size of a tape?

 

Ben

[DSapseid]

Tapes are Maxell Ultrium3 lto 400/800gb using it compressed as we have 8 servers!!!

[plexer]

Thing is though you will never get the compression needed to fit 800gb onton a 400gb tape so that could be your issue full stop.

 

Ben

[maniac]

I'll second that, you'll never obtain the claimed compressed capacity, although you usually manage 2/3 - 3/4 of it, 510GB seems a little low for it to be filling up, but is the most likely explanation.

 

Are you using hardware or software compression??

 

Mike.

[bossman]

We had the same problem with backups using compression on our servers to backup onto 100Gb tapes. As with yours it gets so far and then asks for more media at around 2.30am in the morning (well like a good NM i get out of bed and go into work and put in a fresh tape hehe! like hell i do) I bought 2 NAS servers from buffalo and now all my backups are spread to these using Acronis enterprise server and restore.

[maniac]

I have one of these in LTO3 form which means I can be lazy when it comes to chaning tapes! Backup's only running at about 310GB at the moment, so will be a while before that's redundant.

 

Mike.

[DSapseid]

Cheers guys for all the responses.

 

I have just sat down and looked through each folder to see exactly what it was backing up and found over 130gb of backups from when we merged networks last may. and over 20gb of old user data from the old networks!!!! :oops:

 

Think that might have been why it was filling up!!! Have just stuck the new tape in and set it to start at 20.00 so i will see what happens in the morning.

 

Dan

[djm968]

Just to add my 2p worth, Symantec Backup Exec 10d test run jobs will fail with a media capacity error when the total byte count of the backup job exceeds the native capacity of the media.

 

Since the test run job has no way of calculating the compression ratio of the files being backed up (as the compression ratio will vary greatly depending on the type of file that is attempting to be compressed and the type of compression used) the test run job uses the native capacity of the media as a basis of its test. If hardware or software compression is used during the backup job, the backup will complete successfully if no other errors are encountered.

 

The following Veritas knowledge base document provides more information.

 

http://support.veritas.com/docs/259417

[ranj]

defo a compression problem, had the same problem with sony ait-3 drives. 50gb native and 130 compressed. after about 55gb it would ask for another tape.