What to do with incomplete tape sets

[danmoriarty]

I'm running a backup set for a continously growing image library (currently 1 TB). So we have backupA-tape 1, backupA-tape 2, backupA-tape3, etc., all the way to tape #22 now.

 

When Retrospect gets a 206 error, saying "heads are dirty," it stops with the tape it is on and asks for a new one. The problem is, I only get 15-20 GBs on that tape out of a possible 80 GBs. When this happens several times, I get a lot of wasted tape space.

 

Any suggestion on what to do when this happens? I don't want to rebuild the whole set cause it's so huge, covering multiple tapes. I do clean the tape heads, but apparently not often enough. Maybe my approach to the backup isn't ideal, I don't know.

 

Any help or suggestions would be good. Thanks.

[rhwalker]

Quote:

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Any suggestion on what to do when this happens?

 

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Do a manual cleaning cycle while Retrospect is asking for a tape. I'm battling a similar issue with our Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u Autoloader (SCSI). The most recent drive firmware update made changes to the error recovery routines, and now, about once a week or so, when Retrospect moves a barcoded tape (backup set member) from the autoloader to the drive as it moves through the scripted backups, it believes that the tape is "erased" or "unknown content". I suspect that an error is happening as Retrospect is trying to read the tape header. It's a difficult thing to troubleshoot, and I'm now going to revert to the prior firmware version and perform regression tests. I've determined that it's not the tapes (new tapes) and it's not the cleaning cartridge (tried new cleaning cartridge, same results). Problem never happened with prior firmware version, started a few days after the firmware update. Gathering data takes a bit of time....

 

So much for my problem. Anyway, when this happens, and when Retrospect is demanding that the needed tape be found and provided, I use the "eject" button in Retrospect to eject the believed-erased tape back into the autoloader, then do a manual cleaning cycle from the front panel of the drive (using the cleaning cartridge in the autoloader's cleaning slot), then use the Retrospect menu to move the believed-erased tape back into the drive from the autoloader, and things continue normally. Perhaps some variant of this would work for you.

 

Regards,

 

Russ

[danmoriarty]

Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it.

 

The problem I'm looking to solve is how to deal with Retropsect once it declares one of my backup set tapes no good. It says, backup-tape 22 can't be written to, tape heads dirty, etc. and then I am suppposed to start a new tape. But tape 22 still has 60-70 GBs available on it. I clean the tape drive, but I can no longer add to that tape. It stinks, cause it's a lot of wasted space. And since this is an ongoing, very large backup set, I can't easily just start over.

[nekr0phage]

If the data written to a particular tape is minimal, you could declare the tape missing, erase it and reuse it. Retrospect will consider all data on that tape lost and back it up again the next time you run a backup to that set. This would be assuming that the original data is still on the source volume.

[danmoriarty]

Thanks. I thought about doing that, but wasn't sure how Retrospect would react to a missing tape, if it would keep asking for it, etc. I'll give that a try.