Weird, weird stuff a happening

[showe]

Hi-

 

One of my co-workers ejected all the tapes from our Retrospect server through the tape machine's console instead of through Retrospect. When inserting the tapes back after the maintanence was complete, Retrospect is reading the tapes incorrectly. It's labeling some tapes as "Content Unrecognized" (but then on a subsequent scan will actually put a name to the tape...but it's completely wrong. Ex.: It assigned two tapes a barcode and a name that had already been pulled...I was holding the physical tapes IN MY HAND that Retrospect said we're still in the drive. These very tapes were scanned by Retrospect previously as "Content unrecognized"). I know those tapes are legit as the media sets that ARE being read correctly have tapes missing from them, Retrospect doesn't seem to notice though, it just keeps writing to the set.

 

I hope this is understandable. Please ask me questions if I'm being unclear.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Scott

[twickland]

Sounds like something has gone awry with communication between your tape library and your computer (or at least Retrospect). With Retrospect not running, reboot your tape library (probably best to reboot the host computer as well, or at least reset the communications bus).

 

If the problem continues, please report back, but include more information about your system, including your hardware, OS version, Retrospect version, and Retrospect Driver Update (RDU) version.

[showe]

Thank you. Have already tried those things with no effect. Here's the specs you asked for:

 

1.8 GHz G5

6GB RAM

2x750GB HD Mirrored

OS 10.5.8

Retrospect version 6.1.230

RDU: 6.1.16.100

[twickland]

You should also tell us the brand and model of tape library, tape drive(s), HBA interface card, and type of interface.

 

While Retrospect may be at fault here, I'd suspect a problem somewhere in the tape device chain.

[showe]

It's a Quantum Scaler i6000 with 148 slots, 18 of which are assigned to Retrospect. It's an Apple Fiber Channel card linked to a QLogic controller.

 

Thanks.

[Daniels]

The best course of action I have found is to shut down Retrospect, then load the tapes manually, restart the backup unit so it can do its own scan, start Retrospect and have it do a scan of tapes and everything should appear correctly. Since Retrospect was not involved in the ejection process it cached its information so when the new tapes were inserted it still thought they were the old ones.

[showe]

Thanks. If this happens again Ill try that in that order. I, unfortunately, had to bite the bullet and erase the mislabelled tapes just to get backups running again. I did do all those steps but perhaps not in the right way. Is my suspicion true that Retrospect "remembers" where the tapes of a set are and if you eject those tapes by another means and don't put the tapes back in the exact same slots, Retrospect will get confused? Just curious because that was my theory.

[Daniels]

I have found your theory to be true. The other way I have found to correct Retrospect is to load each tape into the drive through Retrospect so that Retrospect recognizes the content of the tapes. Depending on how many tapes you have to load this can be a real pain in the neck. Just remember that if you ever need to do something manually with the tape library always shut down Retrospect first.

[showe]

Retrospect WAS shut down when the tapes were ejected, they just werent ejected by Retrospect but through the tape drives console. Will that cause this error?

[Mayoff]

http://kb.retrospect.com/articles/en_US/Retrospect_Article/Tape-drive-shows-up-as-Content-Unrecognized-in-Retrospect/

[pmcdonald]

I'm having exactly the same problem. Ticking off as many of the KB suggestions as was possible hasn't solved the problem.

 

My wonderful workaround is to mark the tape as missing and move on, which so far has worked as we run duplicate LTO backups for just this sort of scenario, but I would love to know why Retrospect baulks at manually ejected tapes.