fbackup and cronjob

[junlin shen]

hello, all: pls help
use sam tocreate fbackup job and put in cron job. cron job completed for one or two days and failed for another two or three days. log msg tells start time and failed time.

[Philip Chan_1 · Accepted solution]

What was the return code (rc) in /var/sam/log/br_log? if that was a '4' that actually means completed with warnings.

Also, make sure you clean your tape drive regularly. The tapes may be bad too, have you tried using new tapes to re-do the backup after every failure?

Philip.

[Tim Malnati]

The fact that the cron job ran fine for a couple of days suggests any failure that may have occurred is probably tape related. Bad tape? Tape drive clean? Tape write enabled? Another common problem is running out of room to accomplish a single tape backup (can't change tape with cron). File growth could be it or did you possibly add one or more file systems to the machine? A lot of people forget that the new file system(s) have to be specifically excuded if the / (root) file system has been included in the fbackup graph.

The best way to see what went wrong is from the email sent to the user (probably root) from the cron job. Fbackup error messages can be a bit confusing at times, but failures like the ones I've mentioned are straight forward.

[Vincente Fernandes]

Backups can fails due to various reasons like, tape drive not clean, bad tape, more data then the tape capacity etc. The best way to troubleshoot other then reviewing the sam or cronjob logs file is to try and run the "fbackup" job at the command line if possible and find out the reason why it fails.

[Cheryl Griffin]

It would also be helpful to know what the fbackup fail codes were. Plus, any other details such as: what type of backup failed? Meaning, did you make a full backup, followed by incremental backups and it is the incremental backup that is failing? OR are you running a full backup each time?

[Animesh Chakraborty]

can you give us your crontab entry. Does it look like this:
# Month-end OS backup
0 0 1 * * /usr/sam/lbin/br_backup DAT FULL Y /dev/rmt/0m /etc/sam/br/graph root
Y 1 N > /var/tmp/SAM_br_msgs 2>&1
beside cleaning your tape drive pls check whether there was any change in tape drive configuration like 0m to 1m etc..during that period.
Thanks
Animesh