HP 1/8 G2 Ultrium 920 / LTO3 ask for new media after backup of 360 GB on Ultrium 3 tape

[Tombac]

My backup works for many years properly (Brightstore ARCserve r11.5 on Windows Storage Server 2003 SP2).

Since last week no backup-job will be finished. After ca. 360GB of saving the software ask for new media. This for every job and all medias (7) in the autoloader.

The data compression of the autooader is active, so the tapes should store in minimum 400GB. The effective datasize to backup is ca. 380GB.

On machine, SCSI-Interface and software are all of the current updates included.

Any ideas, to fix this problem?

Thanks and greets.

Tombac

[Eric_de_Lange]

There are several possible causes;

1. drive has to rewrite a lot of data blocks due to worn tape or drive which consumes space on tape

2. backup of already compressed data sets possibly increasing the space consumed on tape

To investigate, download a copy of HP Library and tape tools and run a health check on the drive. There are also some other tests in HP L&TT which might be usefull in diagnisic the issue at hand.

[Tombac]

Hi Eric de Lange

Thank you for your fast answer and sorry about my late reply. I have checked your points:

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1. drive has to rewrite a lot of data blocks due to worn tape or drive which consumes space on tape

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I'm not sure to understand this point correct. In the last week I've formatting and/or erasing the tape many times. The result was always the same: No success for the backup.

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2. backup of already compressed data sets possibly increasing the space consumed on tape

The data I'll backing up is not compressed (only the normally zip-archives).

To investigate, download a copy of HP Library and tape tools and run a health check on the drive. There are also some other tests in HP L&TT which might be useful in diagnisic the issue at hand.

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I've just installed the HP Library and tape tools. The health brought me an error by the removable storage manager (RSM). After stopping this service nothing changed by the backup process.

So, finally I cleaned my data and could get about 50 GB free space. I found out that some files are too long (over 260 characters). After correcting these faults the backup run successfully.

Hope, the last point was the problem.

Next step will be to upgrade the backup-software to release 15 or 16.

Thank you for your help.

Greetings from Switzerland.

Tombac