Quality of media in a media pool

[Jay Cantwell]

What causes a media in a media pool to be marked poor. I have the expiration set to 12 months and overwrites set to 250. I have tapes in this pool that are approximately 10 months old. At 6 months they were marked fair and now they have marked as poor.

What is causing this please ?

Jay

[Sheriff Andy]

What is your backup software? What type of tapes do you have?

We have Veritas Netbackup Datacenter with LTO1 tapes. Some of our tapes have been mounted over 600 times & over 4 to 5 years old.

I have worked with DLT4 tapes before that wouldn't last long primarily because most of the tapes were somewhat dirty causing the drives to go down and ruin the tape.

Andy

[Jay Cantwell]

Andy....we are using Data Protector 5.1. The tapes are Ultrium DLT tapes. These tapes have only been written to one time. However my problem is, when I look at the media database it has marked them as poor. They were written to in February 2005 and put in a vault. This is not as a result of attempting to write to the tape again, that would make sense to me marking a bad tape poor. But they have just been there not reused and not marked bad by the DP5.1 program in the database. My question is what has made this happen?

thanks...jay

[Sheriff Andy]

I can't speak for Data Protector, but I know that sometimes a tape will get somewhat gummy even if the tape is new. In my experience the other tapes in the library were gummy so it rubbed off on the tape drive which in effect rubbed off on the new tape.

Have you had any tapes eat up a tape drive? Have you had to run your clean tape utility on your tape drives?