Wendy,
I had a problem recently where the DAT drive on one of our HP servers could not properly read OR write, until I did a cold reset, so I would guess that either the firmware inside the drives or more likely the software drivers partially lock up once in a blue moon.
I overwrite most of my batch of tape once every week, and try to replace them every year. That might be pushing my luck, but if you want to be sure that they are actually readable, you should have the backup software perform a partial or full verify of the tape contents. I have mine compare the first 10Mb after every nightly full backup, which is a good indicator of the state of the tape being used - and it shouldn't take more than a few minutes over and above the time it takes to do the backup itself.
HTH!
Andz.
-----Original Message-----
From: WENDY BOWEN [mailto:WENDY.BOWEN@...]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 11:35 AM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] (OT)backup tapes physical retention
Hi everyone!
We have a retention time of 20 days before we turn around our backup
tapes and recycle them for another back up job. I was test restoring
some data off of a DAT tape and the restore was not successful because
the tape was no longer readable. My backup job did not give me any error
indicating this about the tape. Does anyone know how many actual WRITES
or OVERWRITES a backup tape should have. DAT? DLT? AIX?
Thanks!
~Wendy
++ Andy Watts
++ Ripley Engineering Ltd
++ Tel: 01256-473940
++ Fax: 01256-479991
++ mailto: andy@...
I had a problem recently where the DAT drive on one of our HP servers could not properly read OR write, until I did a cold reset, so I would guess that either the firmware inside the drives or more likely the software drivers partially lock up once in a blue moon.
I overwrite most of my batch of tape once every week, and try to replace them every year. That might be pushing my luck, but if you want to be sure that they are actually readable, you should have the backup software perform a partial or full verify of the tape contents. I have mine compare the first 10Mb after every nightly full backup, which is a good indicator of the state of the tape being used - and it shouldn't take more than a few minutes over and above the time it takes to do the backup itself.
HTH!
Andz.
-----Original Message-----
From: WENDY BOWEN [mailto:WENDY.BOWEN@...]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 11:35 AM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] (OT)backup tapes physical retention
Hi everyone!
We have a retention time of 20 days before we turn around our backup
tapes and recycle them for another back up job. I was test restoring
some data off of a DAT tape and the restore was not successful because
the tape was no longer readable. My backup job did not give me any error
indicating this about the tape. Does anyone know how many actual WRITES
or OVERWRITES a backup tape should have. DAT? DLT? AIX?
Thanks!
~Wendy
++ Andy Watts
++ Ripley Engineering Ltd
++ Tel: 01256-473940
++ Fax: 01256-479991
++ mailto: andy@...