VMS Backup

[Dave Melsome]

Morning,

I have been handed responsibilty of our Alpha system as I have been on an introductory to OpenVMS course.

During the week we run a backup to our DLT drive which goes through the process of backing up the drives and then backing up an Oracle dump file.

Just recently we have been encountering errors when it goes to backup this dump file. The error that gets logged is :

%BACKUP-F-OPENOUT, error opening MKB500:[000000]FL8DMP.SAV; as output
-SYSTEM-F-DRVERR, fatal drive error.

Hopefully this something to somebody??

Cheers

Dave

[Volker Halle]

Dave,

welcome to the OpenVMS ITRC forum and the world of OpenVMS ;-)

It looks like there is a possible hardware problem with your MKB500: DLT tape.

Does the tape drive log errors ?
Does $ SHOW ERROR show a non-zero error count for MKB500: ?

Do your backup procedures succeed to write anything onto that tape ?

Can you put an empty DLT cassette into the tape drive, try MOUNT/FOR/NOASSIST MKB500: ? Does is work ?

Then try BACKUP *.* MKB500:test.bck/SAVE/REWIND/LOG

Any errors ?

Finally DISM/UNL MKB500: to dismount and unload the tape.

Volker.

[Dave Melsome]

Volker,

Thanks for your speedy reply.

#Does the tape drive log errors ?

Yes when I ran that command I got :

Device Error Count
PABSA0$MKB500: 39

#Do your backup procedures succeed to write anything onto that tape ?

Yes it successfully backups the disks on the server.

I will try the test backup - will this backup everything on the server?? or should I specify an area as the server is used during the day.

Cheers

Dave

[Robert Gezelter]

Dave,

Welcome to the OpenVMS forum.

First question, what is the error count when you start the backup?

Follow on questions include:
How old are the tape cartridges?
When was the last time that the drive was cleaned?
How controlled is your machine room environment for dust, etc.?

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Volker Halle]

Dave,

do your backup procedures actually directly write to the tape or do they backup to a file and then finally copy that file to tape ?

If SHOW ERR shows tape errors, these are cumulative, i.e. there have been that much errors logged against the tape drive since the last boot.

$ BACKUP *.* MKB500:TEST.BCK/SAVE/REW will only copy all file from your current directory. You can also create a simple text file and just backup that file to tape with:

$ BACKUP test.txt MKB500:TEST.BCK/SAVE/REWIND

to see whether you can write anything to that tape drive.

You could also try to analyze the tape errors by translating ERRLOG.SYS with DECevent - if that's installed on your system.

Volker.