fbackup failing on LTO drive

[Ng Kim Meng]

Hi,

I seems to be having an intermittent problem doing a fbackup to my LTO drive. Error msg show below :-

WRITE ERROR while writting data record, at media record XXXXXXX attempting to make this volume salvagable rewrite the volume from beginning.

This is a new server (rp5470) running HP-UX11.0 we just acquired recently and comes with an internal ultrium drive (230 series).

The fbackup command I'm using is :-

/etc/fbackup -I /opr/bkup/citygas.log -v0f /dev/rmt/1m -g /opr/bkup/citygasgraph

where citygasgraph file contains the dirs I need to backup.

HP engr has upgraded the drive firmware from E15D to E20D, and applied a series of fbackup enhancement patches, including PHCO_25424 (cumulative fbackup(1M)/frecover(1M) patch). Also the LTO drive, LVD SE SCSI card, LVD SCSI cable and LVD SE terminator have been changed.

But the problem still presisted, and seems to be getting even more frequent.

I just wondering if anyone has encountered similiar problem.

Thanks for any feedback.
- Kim Meng

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

To verify whether this is related to fbackup, can you perform a tar backup on the same file to the same LTO drive and check whether it works?

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Steve Lewis]

We have found that LTO Ultrium drives require good quality tapes to work without problems. We had problems for months on reading and writing, wondering if it was the drive, the media, the backup software or something else.
By gradually eliminating things and testing, we eventually tried changing the tapes to be HP or Maxell only and the errors mysteriously went away...
Its not the same mechanism as DLT, don't rely on past tape performance as a reliable guide.

[Frank Slootweg]

Adding to the other responses:

Also set a "blocksperrecord" size of at least 64 (KByte). The default size (16) is way too small for LTO (It already is too small for DDS.). See the fbackup(1M) manual page for details.

[Ng Kim Meng]

Thank to all who have given their valuable feedback.

For info, I'm using HP tapes, which is supposed to be of good quality. But it's really is not so much of a media problem.

HP has reverted with the info that there is a known bug using fbackup on certain LTO drive (mine is an ultrium 230 series), and they are still working on the fixes.

In the meantime, they are also testing another series of ultrium drive with fbackup in Germany, and result appears to be good.

As an interim, I have just change my backup from fbackup to cpio, although HP engr has informed me that both cpio and tar are not fully tested out on all ultrium drive as yet, and they cannot warantee that these will be trouble-free in all cases.

If anyone have any other supplementary info to add, that will be most welcome.

So, thanks once again for all the feedbacks given.

Best rgd,
- Kim Meng