There were two incidents, at two different companies:

The first problem was with a DLT 7000 mechanism -- we upgraded to DLT 8000 mechanisms in the tape library, and everything went fine 'till we needed a restore -- some of the tapes refused to be read. We tried them in another library that had DLT 7000s -- still no luck. Luckily, the drives hadn't been excessed, and they still had the originals -- and they had to read _every_last_ tape that had been written on the problem mechanism, and write it back out using a different drive. (we didn't have anyone verifying the backups had been written cleanly ... hell, when we had a big disaster years later (complete loss of the mail system for 30k students), we found that the 'full' backups politely stopped at 2GB without throwing warnings, rather than exceeding maximum file size for Solaris 2.6 -- too bad we were running Solaris 7, and backing up 36GB partitions.)

The second problem with the DLTs weren't that we couldn't read it on a newer tape drive -- it's that we didn't have a tape drive to read it from. The data was migrated to a new system, and the older system was decommissioned and excessed. The DLT drive was given away to another department ... before I ever started working there. Years later, someone went to look through the data repository, and realized some data was missing -- so we called up the offsite storage folks, and had them deliver the backups -- which were DLT-IV. So, we managed to get the DLT mechanism back from the folks who had it ... but we didn't have the necessary software to read the tapes back in. (I wasn't dealing with the restore ... it was either Alpha/VMS or Alpha/Tru64). I know Amy spent a few months on it, but I don't know if she ever got the data restored, or just gave up.

In reply to Re^4: (OT) Redundant Backup by jhourcle
in thread (OT) Redundant Backup by fundflow

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