We have been using a 824 appliance for about 6 weeks. We have been struggling with the tape Archive ever since. Now that my data is beginning to get purged for space and I have been unsuccessful getting archives I am getting worried.
The tape library is a Dell Powervault 124T w/ an IBM LTO6 drive and SAS connection to the 824.
I am on my second support case on this - the first time they asked me to update the firmware - that helped some but issue persisted.
I just reopened another case. Support has been very responsive both times but so far no joy.
The library is only using one magazine, 8 tapes. When I go to prepare the tape set - say I am using three tapes. It pulls the first two tapes, then grabs the third but never completes the job. It just says idle. If I terminate the job, it seems the tape set does not get created. If I simply start a backup job it will progress and park the tape that is in the drive before grabbing tape one.
The other BIG issue I have is jobs just stall. Most of my server backups average a little under 250Gb. They will often write 100+ Gb and then just sit for many hours (I have left it up to 48 hours), finally I am forced to Terminate it then reboot the 824 appliance. Stopping and starting the Archive Service does not do anything.
It's not always the same backup jobs that stall either. One job may stall two or three times - and I may get it to go on the fourth attempt. This is an absolute time killer and wasting an immense amount of tape space.
The one thing I have noticed - it seems physical server backups write off far more reliably. Also VMWare servers that are simply file servers hosting normal data usually are more reliable.
Servers that host .gho (Ghost) images and/or .wim (Windows Image X files) seem to have the biggest issues with failure. It seems like something is bad or timing out in the rehydrate process as it writes the archives.
I can successfully mount these backups and retrieve data.
There is a very long thread on tape archives on the forum from a year ago but I didn't see anything that helped there. It did appear that a number of people were using Dell Powervault 124T units though - pre LTO6 however.
Waiting for another day with support on this hoping those backups I can't get on tape don't disappear before I can get a solution.
Other than this I love the Unitrends - but a backup that can't store long term data is useless to me.
Thanks,
Scott
