Failed tape backup due to power failure

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

I was running a tape backup, and the tape server lost power during the backup, twice... So several of the source jobs were not backed up. Can I just erase the tapes that were used, and run the tape job again? Or do I have to do something else to erase this failed backup from history?

PJ

[perjonsson1960]

Never mind, it seems that the tape job restarted itself again after 24 hours. We'll see what happens with that...

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello!
Thanks for coming back, let us know how it goes, and if it finishes copying the jobs that weren't there. If a specific error appears, please open a support ticket first.

I think it will finish without any problem, similar to when a backup copy gets interrupted.

Thanks

[perjonsson1960]

It did not go well. After a while, when the tape job had restarted, I got this error:

"Job has been terminated Error: Tape library assigned to media pool GFS Media Pool does not contain any enabled tape drive."

I think that a power loss during a tape backup is just too much to handle for the tape job.

Back to the question about erasing the tapes; If I erase the tapes that were used in this tape backup, do the backups that were successfully written to tape get removed from the Veeam database, so I can start fresh with a new tape backup?

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Let me double check the behaviour and question and will come back with answers, meanwhile please do not delete any tape.

[perjonsson1960]

Any more info to share about this?

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Yes, I've checked with QA, and what they told me:
First, you will need to run the Tape rescan so the tape will become online
Second, if you do not have any completed backup on these tapes, you can run mark as free and restart the tape gfs backup.

Give it a try and let us know

[perjonsson1960]

There are sources successfully written to these tapes. Success: 13, Warning: 4, Failed: 3.

Does this mean that I cannot erase these tapes? Will the 17 sources that didn't fail be "left hanging" in the database, but with no data to restore? Perhaps it is best to keep these tapes as they are, and take new tapes for the next backup?

[jorgedlcruz]

I would recommend that behavior yes, so you do not lose those 13 success points. If I am not mistaken, on the new tapes it should take the new GFS retention without a doubt, and I have been told it will take those 7 that were hanging.

At this point, I can not give it a try in my lab. To be 100% correct, and avoid any problem, would you mind opening a support ticket to obtain an official confirmation via email? Thanks!

[david.domask]

GFS has a failure mechanism to catch GFS periods missed due to job failures:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

>If there is a technical problem, for example, the tape library is offline, or the backup server is down, the GFS job will not run. When the problem is fixed, the GFS job will archive one most recent missed full backup for each media set.

The User Guide is a bit modest here, it will try for quite a few periods in fact.

In 99.9% of situations if there is a hardware issue during tape backup, as long as the server hosting the Configuration Database wasn't affected, at worst you'll just need to rescan the tape server and let the job run again, and it will handle it just fine If the configuration database server was affected, I would still run the job and just see if errors appear, but there is a non-zero chance of potential database inconsistencies...but it's quite rare I would say as I just cannot recall any cases with such a scenario that had DB issues.

If there is a failure to the tape hardware, I would advise just out of caution to retire that tape (not a Veeam process, I mean just pull it out of rotation) cause who knows what might have happened to it when the drive suddenly just stopped mid-write.