I appreciate your feedback. The daily tapes are written to 12 times each day (full and incrementals on the same tape), and each daily tape is used once each week. There are also weekly tapes that are written to once and used once/month, and a monthly pool that is written to each month, with the tapes recycled once/year. They have had both daily and weekly tapes go bad.
I'll look into diagnostics on the drive and see where it goes from there. Thanks again! Mike Don MacArthur wrote: > [I just re-read this and it sounds gruff. I'm just in a hurry, I do > sympathize with you. Read this with a helpful tone, which is how it's > intended. Thx] > > You say how many jobs run each day, but not how many tapes are written. > In this case, the number of tapes is more relevant than the number of > jobs. > > I use LTO2 and 3. I and another SA at another shop have been running > both for a year. I use 1 tape a day and it gets written to twice each > month. I have a pool of 3s that never leave the library. Their > contents expire every 2 weeks, and they get overwritten about once a > month (I have excess capacity, so the math is wrong but the facts are > correct). > > Neither shop nor the software (HP DataProtector and Bacula) have cleaned > any of the drives with any effect on problems we had. When we did it > was to satisfy the tech support person on the other end of the phone > (obviously not Bacula as I've never had to call tech support for it [8-) > and it didn't solve the problem. I have a situation where DP will > incorrectly mark a tape bad if a specific situation occurs. But, it's a > false positive. LTO2 and 3 are the same in this respect. > > Cutting to the chase: > 1. Buy only tapes with lifetime warranties, so you don't care if the > tape goes bad. Just re-run the backup and get the tape replaced. > 2. Your client probably has a drive problem, possibly caused by excess > cleaning. If it is cleaned once and the problem continues, it wasn't > the tape drive. It's kind of like rebooting/insanity. "Insanity is > repeating the same thing and hoping for a different outcome." See if > the drive vendor has any diagnostic utilities. > > Don. > > On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 11:55 -0700, Michael Morgan wrote: >> First of all, let me just say that Bacula is wonderful. I migrated to it >> after a very unreliable (and expensive) commercial product >> implementation. Bacula works flawlessly, and is very simple to configure >> and operate. Great product! Keep up the good work. >> >> Now for my question: >> >> Does anyone have experience with practical tape and drive life spans of >> LTO-2 drives and tapes? >> >> We have a client with an LTO-2 drive that runs 12 backup jobs/day (one >> full and 11 incremental). They have cleaned their drive regularly, but >> lately, they seem to be losing a lot of tapes to errors. >> >> Ideas? Suggestions? >> >> Thanks for all the help I see on this list. -- Michael L. Morgan Director of Operations Iodynamics, LLC (435) 760-1046 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
