Tape Reclamation

[Strecker25]

Is Veeam v9.5 not capable of tape reclamation after a failed job? We often have issues with large jobs and it appears that veeam does not mark the tape as free after the failure even though the only data on it is the partial full from that large job. We have a bunch of tapes that report as full but have no Veeam files on them and I can only think of this being the cause.

[Shestakov]

Ryan, the job may fail, but still have some backups successfully copied to the tape.

We have a bunch of tapes that report as full but have no Veeam files on them and I can only think of this being the cause.

That looks strange. You mean there no files at all, but VBR treats the tapes as full? What about protection period, is that applied for them?
By the way, what is the reason backup to tape jobs are failing?
Thanks!

[veremin]

The half-written tape doesn't get marked as free automatically. You will need to erase it manually (mark as free, alternatively) or wait till retention chimes in.

By the way, only the backup files successfully written to this media will be visible via GUI.

Thanks.

[Strecker25]

Thanks, the jobs have failed for a few different reasons. Some appear to be tape library related, mechanism errors, etc. Quite often we see this:

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1/11/2017 3:41:10 PM :: Loaded tape has unexpected media ID. Most likely, this is caused by duplicate barcode. Please insert the correct tape.  

which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because we do not have duplicate bar codes.

And also, these:

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1/5/2017 12:11:03 AM :: Error: read: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host read: End of file Unable to retrieve next block transmission command. Number of already processed blocks: [534765].

Also, and this may be a bug, when we right click a "full" tape and go to properries to view its contents they show no data. If i do a catalog of that tape, the data shows up in the properties tab temporarily. If we go away a while and then come back, say an hour later, the properties tab is again empty unless we do a catalog of that tape. I have tried to do catalogizaton of the entire library and it only temporarily fixes the issue. Is this a known problem?

[Dima P.]

Ryan,

which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because we do not have duplicate bar codes.

Was that a pure 9.5 installation or you upgraded you existing VBR server? By the way, do you have Update 1 installed? Last error usually means that connection was dropped between repository and tape server while writing data to tape. This issue should be resolved in Update 1

If i do a catalog of that tape, the data shows up in the properties tab temporarily

Are you referring to successful tape job run i.e. not affected by errors you posted?

[Strecker25]

Are you referring to successful tape job run i.e. not affected by errors you posted?

Yes, sorry. On tapes that have been successfully written to by tape jobs. In the properties tab we don't see any files listed, until a tape catalog is run against that tape. Once complete the data will show up, but only for a short while after which the properties window again goes blank.

[Dima P.]

Ryan,

Very strange behavior which looks like a bug. Kindly, open a support case and share the case id.

[Strecker25]

Will do, also installing update 1 today. Will post results after we re-run some tape jobs post update

[Dima P.]

Ryan,

Please keep us posted, as QA team is interested in your issue too. Thanks!