server01      /var/log       lev 0  FAILED "No new tape."

 

I do full backups every night (filling up about 43% of a single tape and there hasn’t been a significant increase in the amount of data I back up), and this morning the level 0 dumps were all on holding disk.  Usually, if something does go wrong like I forget to insert the next tape, I see level 1 dumps on holding disk and just flush them.

 

I thought that maybe the tape drive needed a clean (which I did) or there was something wrong with the tape.  Due to time constraints I decided to remove the dumps on holding disk using amadmin, and inserted the next tape in line.  I did an amcheck and it seemed happy with the tape and clients the way it always does.

 

But now the job is running and I can see that the DLEs are being dumped at level 0, but that they’re failing to write to tape again.  It should be using the tape daily-22, and the tapelist seems fine to me, although the tape that should be used appears at the top of the list and I have a suspicion that before it usually appeared at the bottom (maybe I’m imagining that):

 

20091023190001 daily-22 reuse

20091022190001 daily-21b reuse

20091021190001 daily-20 reuse

20091021103229 daily-19b reuse

etc, etc.

 

I attach the taper debug log file as far as it’s been written, if that helps.

 

I haven’t made any changes to the server for a very long time.  The only change I made recently was to label a new tape called daily-19b for Tuesday night’s backup run.

 

I would really appreciate some advice on how to troubleshoot this problem.

 

Thanks.