Library tape indicate Erased during catalog rebuild

[tclifton]

Hi,

I'm trying to rebuild the catalog for a backup set residing on tape. I have the Exabyte firewire VXA 1u packetloader device. My server is OS X 10.4.2 and Retrospect version 6. After loading the 10 tapes into the library slots, Retrospect indicated the tapes are erased. After selecting Rebuild Catalog from tape under the catalog Fix/Repair menu option, I loaded 1 tape into the drive and it indicated "Erased". After loading all of the other tapes, 1 tape registered with the Backup Set name. After reading that tape, Retrospect asks for another tape. I then loaded all of the other tapes into the drive AGAIN, and they all indicate erased but one of the tapes read ok. The same thing happened after the 2nd tape was read; I had to manually load all tapes to find one that would be read.

 

I cleaned the drive prior to the orinal backup and the catalog rebuild. I clean the drive at all intervals. Has anyone experienced this. My concern is that not all tape will be read.

 

Is there some hash or other index stored on the tape? It seems that there must be in order for a catalog rebuild to be possible?

 

Thanks

[rhwalker]

This is a "feature" of Retrospect's interaction with the Exabyte autoloader. Like you, we've got a new Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u PacketLoader, and I also noticed this behavior. Retrospect will exhibit this behavior (believe that the tape is erased) if the tape is not rewound when Retrospect starts using it. There are many ways this can be repeated: power fail during lengthy backup with clean Xserve shutdown when the UPS battery gets to a certain percentage left - that's how I found it - or, which is what I suspect happened to you, a verify that is manually cancelled in the middle. The workaround is to ensure that Retrospect only starts on rewound tapes. There are a couple of preferences to cause Retrospect to rewind on quit, but that's really not quite what is needed to cover all situations. Once you get into this, um, mess, the way to fix things is to move the tape to the drive, unload the tape back to the autoloader (causes rewind on unload), export the tape from the autoloader using the front buttons, take the tape out when the door opens and then reinsert into the same slot and import. This seems to cause some sort of flag to be set in the autoloader to indicate that a tape has been removed/inserted, and Retrospect re-examines the (now rewound) tape and discovers its name. I've submitted a feature request for a future version of Retrospect to either (if Dantz considers this an Exabyte-only issue) rewind the tape before doing any operations in the Exabyte driver, or (if it's a more general issue) provide an additional preference to rewind the tape before doing any operations. If you think this would help you as well, you might consider submitting a feature request to Dantz's tech support. If enough customers request, then perhaps this will be addressed sooner than later in a future release. Hope this helps. Russ