T20 & Windows 2000

[Philip Hoppe]

My company bought a T20i tape drive (Internal Travan 10/20Gb SCSI), on my recommendation 2 years ago. At the time we were using NT 4.0 (SBS ??? Small business server) on our server.

In the fall I converted the server to Windows 2000, and I have been having problems with the tape drive ever since. First of all, Remote Storage reports it as being incompatible, but uses it anyway ??? Sort of... I have now reached a point where all tapes are listed as ???allocated???, and each time I try to backup I get a message stating that ???no suitable media available??? and I can???t free/retention the tape as it is ???in use???!?!

I just want a really KISS backup of the server: Full backup of all files including Exchange Server ??? Each workdays night ??? Backup on whatever tape is in the drive.

Is that too much to ask for...

I contacted HP, but they said we had to buy either Veritas or Tapeware to backup under Windows 2000 ??? But if we want to backup our Exchange data we have to buy software worth $1000-$1500 which is far more than we paid for the tape drive in the first place???

Does anyone have another solution/option?