Thursday, November 06, 2003

NTBackup on Win2000 Server does not work as expected

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=267574
Scheduled Backups Fail on Standalone Tape Drives After Changing Media
Fiddled around with the tape backup on the fileserver which we just upgraded to Windows 2000. Must say the old NT4 Server backup program was a bit more straightforward to use. It did not fail complaining about invalid tape libraries, unused media, wrong tape names etc. It just did what I asked: make a full network backup on out DLT streamer. Now all kinds of things are going wrong. And then I finally had a working script, with 1 statement working on a .bks file, containing all locations to backup. This went OK the first night. But lo and behold: the second night, from the same scheduled task, it complained about no unused media available" :( Digging into the problem I ended up on abovementioned MS site, which explained a lot. I found out the tape library is not refreshing itself after you manually change taes on a standalone streamer. Which is what we do daily of course. One rought hack was to add a small job before the real full network backup. This first job fails, the library is refreshed and there you go. Additionaly, I had the option of changing reg keys, adding a service etc. But I don't want to change things on the production file server, unless absolutely neccessary. Problem solved