Dear all,
If anyone can shed light on this, I would be so greatful. It has had be stumped for over a month.
Basically, we have an ultrium 4 drive as listed, which uses tapes that support 800 Gb of native data. We do not use compression at all.
Our nightly backup data set is approx 672 Gb in size at the moment. It should fit on one of the tapes, with over 100 Gb of space still free.
When the backup gets to about 600 Gb of data backed up (all having gone well up to that point) it spits out the tape, saying it is full. When I check the details of the tape, it shows it is full, but that only about 600 Gb of data was actually copied to it.
We are using Backup Exec, but have also tried doing backups with Yosemite, to check it wasn't some software issue (although I guess there is a small chance both products could be triggering the same fault).
I have also tried using different tapes (5 in all), different brands (Sony & HP), and as stated above, different software. The problem has generally been consistently there. Once it worked! Got me very excited, but then the problem continued with that same tape. Very weird.
I have also tried formatting tapes in different ways before using them, and the drive is now updated to the latest standalone firmware from HP (52D, to my memory). The unit interfaces with a SAS card provided and recommended by HP, for this specific drive.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. It may just be we have a faulty drive (thankfully I think we are just in warranty) but thought I'd put this out in case anyone has experienced the same, and can help!
Many thanks in advance.
Bluemercury
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Hi there.
Many thanks for your post. Backup Exec is currently using 64k for block size - I was thinking of playing with this on the next backup (which I'm running today). Would you have any specific suggestions? It seems I can go up to 1 Mb in block size....
Yes, they are LTO 4 tapes. LTO 3 would be spitting out at 400 Gb, not getting to 585 GB.
We're not using compression for two reasons. Firstly, what we're backing up is already compressed (they are Image State backups of servers that hold 95% compressed data). Secondly, even if there was a merit to it, I'd like to get this problem fixed, as using compression might only dodge it for a bit. If there's a problem there, it should be sorted, especially if we have to call on our warranty that will run out in a few months!
Thanks for your post - any further thoughts very much appreciated.
64k is recommended. Anything bigger than this can be a PITA for some bureaus to recover if a tape goes bad.
I mentioned the LTO 3 because it struck me as a possibility that the drive might be compressing the data anyway - so, if you were writing slightly compressed data to an LTO 3 tape, it might well fall over at 585Gb. But as you're using LTO 4 tapes, that's not the answer.
What OS driver are you using?
Hey TapeDude.
I see you're way of thinking on LTO 3 - good call. I wish that were the issue!
I have tried both the latest OS driver from HP (for Win 2008 x64, which we're running this on) and have also used the integrated driver offered by Symantec. With both of them, unfortunately the same error occurs. I'm tempted to give the Symantec driver another go, as I have updated the firmware on the drive since the last time I tried this particular driver. You never know, it might play ball better now!
Thanks for your input - I'll let you know in about 7 hours whether this latest try has failed or not....
Many thanks,
Bluemercury
Hi there.
Yes, I'd been of the same mindset, although in a month of trying all sorts had ended up back with the HP drivers. I'm reverting to using the Symantec drivers now, and we'll see if it helps. According to the log I've kept, I have already had the problem at least 5 times whilst running with the Symantec driver. The firmware was changed to a different release a few days ago though, so you never know that might just get it working!
Nope - not using any encryption.
Many thanks again for you input :D
Hi there.
Unfortunately, the backup just failed at the normal point (585 Gb). As an aside, it's interesting to note that with the Symantec drivers, the backup runs about 10% slower than normal.
I think I will be contacting HP tomorrow; I'm praying we're still in warranty. Is there anything else you might be able to think of at all?
Many thanks :D
Hi there - thanks for you last post, sorry for delay in replying.
I didn't do any tests with the ultrium 3 tapes, as it was failing beyond native capacity of one of these (585 GB versus max 400 GB on U3 - although perhaps you were looking to see if the failure was proportionate?). Also, I read some horror stories online about older ultrium tapes getting jammed in this drive, even when they should be fully backward compatible, so shyed away from this.
I increasingly concluded that our drive simply isn't right, and had to have a fault at some level. I ran some HP tool tests again which suddenly confirmed this (it's rare to be grateful when a piece of software tells you there is a fault!).
I raised a warranty request with HP yesterday, and admitedly they were brilliant. Within 3 hours, they'd confirmed approval for replacement, and we received the new unit this morning. The fact they did this so speedily makes me wonder whether our drive was part of a known bad batch / revision version.
The long and short is that I plugged in the new drive this morning, ran the HP tests and all was good. After configuring the new drive with Backup Exec, I ran our backup routine. It completed perfectly with verification (all 655 Gb), at a rate of 4.5 Gb/Min! A fantastic result.
Many thanks for replying to my posts on here - it was helpful to confirm I wasn't going mad and just to fire out the idea to see if anyone could help. With the new drive in place all seems very well now, and this whole issue simply came down to a technical fault.
Cheers for you help, and bothering to post suggestions :D
Bluemercury
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by: bluemercuryPosted on 2009-11-02 at 09:29:36ID: 25721432
Just to add, it screws up at 585 GB of data backed up, and our total data being backed up totals to 672 Gb, according to Windows......