SureStore 718 Backup Problems

[Melissa Handy]

Our SureStore 718 was operating without any problems till the end of October. We are using Veritas Backup Exec ver 8.60. Our last good backup was a daily incremental on 11/3. Our last full backup was 10/29, we backed up 82,640,038,924 bytes in 7 hours. The next full backup we went to run we cancelled after 70 hours and only backed up 43,000,000,000 bytes. We did another backup and it took 29 hours and only backed up 22,000,000,000 bytes before it actually failed saying

Tape Alert Events
Critical
The tape drive has a hardware failure.
Please turn off the drive and turn it back on and try again.


We have done this several times and still cannot get a backup to complete successfully. We used to get about 250mb/min and are now down to 15mb/min. I'm not sure if the long backups are causing the hardware failure or if the hardware failure is causing the long backups.

I am at a loss as to what is causing this, any help would be appreciated. I'm not even sure where to start with this thing to figure out what is causing it.

Thanks,
Melissa

[David Ruska]

This is a very high level error message. Tapealert is a series of warning/error bits that can get sent. This one "tape drive has a hardware fault" is usually set when the drive returns 'hardware error' as the Sense Key on SCSI. It may more not mean something is wrong with the hardware. It is not uncommoon on DLT to be caused by a bad tape, or a dirty head.

The better way to troubleshoot this would be to install HP Library & Tape Tools (www.hp.com/support/tapetools), and generate a "support ticket". With that, we can look a the specific errors logged by the drive and give you an accurate analysis.

[Melissa Handy]

Here is the support ticket log. Not sure if I did this right. I can tell you we have changed tapes and run the cleaning tape with no success. Thanks for your help.

Melissa