Feature Request: Error reporting with bad tapes or drives

[einhirn]

Hello,

of course it shouldn't happen, but from time to time a tape goes bad.

Current behavior:
Veeam doesn't help much with Identifying the bad tape - a tape job just fails and there are multiple possible errors all pointing to some bad tape. But since I've got up to 5 Tape drives per job, and the job might already have used a lot more than 5 tapes when the error happens, I don't see which tape in which drive is causing the problem.

Proposed behavior:
When an error happens, output a message showing which tapes were in which drive at that time. Optimally the error message should identify which drive was responsible for causing the error: I suppose that there are multiple threads running, at least one for each tape drive. One of those threads reports a fatal error of any kind, just have it say "I was responsible for tape drive X, and at that time I was working on Tape Y"...

Thanks for your consideration.
bye
Christian

[Dima P.]

Hello Christian,

Thanks for sharing your feedback! I believe we should mark the bad tape as retired and move it to the expired media pool automatically. You are saying that this is not working in your case?

[einhirn]

No, those tapes aren't retired automatically. The way I understand "retired media pool" is, that a tape goes there when there's an error message from the tape drive. But that obviously isn't the case when there (maybe) was a soft "write error", a "tape positioning" error or something like that. It wreaks havoc with a tape job, but doesn't get the tape expired...

I think Veeam should tell the admin which tape and drive was part of the reason the job failed, even if it doesn't seem to be a tape or drive problem - maybe it's some kind of problem that's slowly growing to the point that indeed error messages will be issued and tapes be retired. Maybe there's even something to do for the admin, which was better done earlier than later. My point is, make debugging of tape problems easier.

[christian.naenny]

I support this feature request!
I just had to deal with a Tape Backup Job that only reported:

Code: Select all

21.10.2022 10:02:24 :: [$servername] Tape fatal error.
The device is not connected.
Tape error: '1167' (The device is not connected.)

It would be nice if the error message would clearly state WHICH device is affected such as

Code: Select all

The device (Drive 5 (Drive ID: Tape 3)) is not connected

Thanks!
Christian

[vmtech123]

Just had this come up today.

Somewhere that in the GUI Or even a log that statistically tracked failed jobs, and which drives/tapes were in use. perhaps an email alert, or after a few times a warning.

Had a job fail a few times. It was the same tape in the same drive so I'm going to have to do some manual tests to rule out each one and eject the tape if need be.

I have diagnostic tapes as well, perhaps allow me to read and or write to a diag tape from Veeam. or even just any blank tape. An example would be select drive 3, grab a scratch tape, write a bit, then read it back then delete it as a drive test.

That could solve the drive testing.

To go one step further, allow me to select the tape so I could verify if the tape is good. if it fails, i could try the tape in a different drive, or a different tape in the same drive.

Tape Verification is fine if I want to verify a working tape with data, but I'd like to just read and write a bit to a tape if possible.