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retrospect keeps loosing tape information


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Hello community,

 

I heavily want to migrate from ArcServe to Retrospect. Im currently restoring arcserve-tapes to have them backed up by retrospect after. sadly retrospect did not ever recognize a single tape so far. whenever I want to continue my backup-operation retrospects asks for the tape I used last ("2-Monatsband" in this case) but retrospect gives the status "unknown" for the corresponding tape. when I view the properties of that tape it shows the correct information but it wont work;(

I have no clue how to solve this and therefore added the screenshot and hope the community can help me.

I heavily want to move to retrospect but without solving this problem I have to use legato or arcserve.

 

 

retrorpoblems.png

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Hi

 

Are you trying to restore Arcserve tapes with Retrospect? If so it won't work.

 

It may be that the Arcserve drivers for the tape drive are still loaded. Make sure to disable the windows drivers for the tape drive and loader in device manager. Also stop any Arcserve services and drivers before you run Retrospect.

 

If you haven't already make sure to install the latest driver update from the Dantz website.

 

Thanks

nate

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Quote:

Hi

 

Are you trying to restore Arcserve tapes with Retrospect? If so it won't work.

 

 


ofcourse not

 

Quote:

 

It may be that the Arcserve drivers for the tape drive are still loaded. Make sure to disable the windows drivers for the tape drive and loader in device manager. Also stop any Arcserve services and drivers before you run Retrospect.

 

 


all ArcServe services were stopped

 

 

Quote:

If you haven't already make sure to install the latest driver update from the Dantz website.

 


im using the driver v53

 

Thanks

claus

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Hello people.

 

I am still stuck at the problem. retrospect wont recognize any tape, even worse: when the drive is empty and you start retrospect the software believes there is a tape in the drive but says "content unrecognized". when retrospect asks to put the tape-XY from backupset-AB I cannot complete the operation because retrospect still believes there is a tape in the drive, so I cannot insert one....

 

is there anyone out there sucessfully using retrospect with Compaq SSL202TL?

does retrospect have problems with tape-libraries in common?

 

I think Ill stay with ArcServe or move to Legato as noone can help me (besides asking me if I try to restore arcserve-tapes with retrospect lol)

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I'm also experiencing the problem where Retrospect is loosing my tape information. I am using the same type of setup at three clients and only one of them is having this issue thus far. When I got onsite today the backup had tape 2 in the main slot and was looking for tape 1, in the library it appeared that all the rest of the tapes were still erased. I grabbed the tape from slot 9 (Retrospect likes to grab the tapes in reverse order for what ever reason) and put it in the main slot and it saw it as tape one and no longer as an erased tape. I've tried power cycling, restarting and rescanning the inventory but nothing makes it recognize the tapes for what they are once it has gone to this place. The odd thing is it seems to happen to one set of my tapes and not the other. (Currently running two sets of 9 that are swapped weekly then erased and reused).

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Hi

 

One thing to try is clearing the loader table in Retrospect. This will reset all of the barcode/slot/tape name associations in Retrospect. To do this hold down the shift key and click on eject all. Then quit Retrospect once, relaunch and scan media.

 

Thanks

Nate

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@merlyn. on oct18 new drivers were released for the macintosh-version of restrospect

 

Quote:

Additional changes with this release

-Resolved an issue where Retrospect could associate a barcode label to an incorrect tape when tapes without barcode labels are manually removed from a library and replaced with unknown tapes containing barcode labels.

-Barcode support has been re-enabled for Sony LIB-81 and LIB-162 tape libraries

-Tracking of tapes and storage slot, import/export slot and tape drive statuses in a library has been improved in Retrospect.

 


 

maybe that helps.

 

@natew: I tried all steps suggested, no success;( the latest driver-update for macintosh sounds similar to my problem. are new drivers for windows being released too?

can I provide any information you could use to help solving the problem?

 

regards

claus

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@natew: another experience in 3-steps.

 

pic1 shows 3tapes in the TL, actually there are only2 tapes in the TL. maybe thats of interest to you. furthermore you see the needed tape is in slot2. when I move the slot2-tape to the drive pic2 shows up. I cut off a little bad but confirm its the slot2-tape in the drive. its shown as write-protected and "unknown".

removing that tape again results in pic3. so it seems retrospect lost the tape information during the load process, thus in the tape properties the correct media is seen. in pic3 you again see the slot3-tape in the drive, I confirm theres no tape in slot3 and no tape in the drive when I made that screenshot.

 

weird, aint it.

 

regards claus

 

retro1.png

retro2.png

retro3.png

 

pic1

pic1

pic1

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Hi

 

Sorry for the slow response. Just getting caught up here...

 

Look at the configure->devices->environment tab. Does it say "devices visible using ASPI"?

 

If the answer is no:

Run the ASPI installer located in the Retrospect program folder. It will change the way Retrospect looks down the bus at this loader. This will require a reboot for the change to take affect.

 

If the answer is yes:

Type ctrl + ALT + P + P at any screen in Retrospect. Under the execution heading click "use NT SCSI passthrough" hit OK and restart Retrospect.

 

Do you have the same problem with new tapes? In other words, could it be an issue where Retrospect is just having trouble reading the tapes that were written in Arcserv?

 

What SCSI adapter are you using? Are there any devices other than the tape library attached to it?

 

Thanks

Nate

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Hi,

 

the answer was YES. switching to SCSI-passthrough didnt seem to change anything.

 

I did not try new-tapes so far. So I cannot comment on that

 

machine info:

Compaq ML370T PIII/733MHz

 

cpqarray2 SCSI-Adapter

COMPAQ SSL2020TL

COMPAQ SDX-500C

 

RAID and backupnode are on different channels one the same controller

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Hi

 

In general RAID controllers are not good for running tape drives. They don't handle asynchronous communication very well. It can work in some cases but very often it doesn't. If you have a different SCSI card handy somewhere I would drop it in and see if you have better results. (I suspect you will)

 

Thanks

Nate

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