Some reasons why we have suddenly seen high numbers of 196 errors include…

 

1)      No exclude list on a new client meant that other clients were sat waiting for access to our disk storage units (limited number of concurrent jobs to the same storage unit) while this new client sent huge amounts of useless data to our data domains.  All the jobs queued will fail when their backup window closes.

2)      Network issues slowed the throughput of our backups to where clients were still waiting to start when their backup window closed.

3)      If your storage units / devices were unavailable you’d be getting a different error code although when we were still backing up to tape we’d get 196’s if we ran out of scratch tapes and the jobs were sat queued waiting for available media to be loaded into the drives.

 

There could be multiple reasons why you’re getting this error.  Do you have your jobs on a time or date schedule ?  Has there been some schedule creep on other backups which is eating into the window for the clients now failing with 196’s ?

 

Mark Glazerman

Desk: 314-889-8282

Cell: 618-520-3401

P please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to