Vernon Display Posted July 24, 2012 Report Share Posted July 24, 2012 Lately, this has been a problem for us when previously we ran without any problems. Using Retrospect Backup version 6.1.230 running on a Mac OSX Server 10.4.11 Files are on a Micronet RAID directly hooked up to the Mac. We have a folder called "Ready for Tape" and when it gets to just below 200 GB, we run a backup and this has been going smoothly for many months. Now, it seems it gets to about 115 or 116 GB and then wants us to put another tape in to continue. The DLT tapes hold 200 GB native or 400 GB compressed, but we never use software compression. We thought maybe we received a bad batch of tapes. So, purchased new ones and are getting the same problems. Does anyone know what may be causing this problem? The tape drive itself is a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 448. Could the drive be the problem all of a sudden? Picture 5.pdf Picture 4.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted July 24, 2012 Report Share Posted July 24, 2012 The only thing Retrospect can know about any tape is what the tape drive itself reports. Your issue may indicate either that the drive is reporting that the tape member is full when its not, or due to read or write errors in either the tape drive, the source volume, or something in between, a lot of blank blocks were written to the tape member. Does the Retrospect operations log show any difference in the MB/min performance between the times that your backups performed as expected and now? If not, I'd suspect the tape drive, though I'd have thought that the drive should have been reporting some errors to Retrospect. HP's Library and Tape Tools, available from their website, should be able to test the drive and see if anything looks odd. The Mac version of Library and Tape Tools (hp_ltt) runs in Terminal and I think requires an Intel processor; you also need to be sure that Retrospect is not running when you launch hp_ltt so that it can see the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vernon Display Posted July 25, 2012 Author Report Share Posted July 25, 2012 Tim: Thank you for your response. I will look into the HP tools. Maybe the drive needs some kind of firmware update since it's about 3 years old. What is odd is that on the Mac that it's connected to, nothing has been changed software wise from when it was running smoothly to the troubles lately, so we are suspecting it may be the tape drive. We've been able to write to tapes, but it has to be only about 100 GB. But, then we are wasting valuable space on these expensive tapes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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