Backup Issues

Well today was fun – to begin with.

The garden was looking very sorry for itself so at the weekend we went out and did a bit of clearing up. It looked much better after all our hard work pruning and generally clearing up the mess. We also moved the bird table we have and put some new plants in. Yesterday morning I woke early and took a look outside. One of the plants was looking a bit 'unhappy'. When I got home from work, I watered it a bit in the hope that it would feel better. Will have to keep an eye on it for now.

Once getting to the office my first task was to re-boot the server I mentioned yesterday – the one that had lost connectivity to the tape library. Had to be done out-of-hours as it is a global system. Luckily all went OK and the backups ran successfully afterwards so that was a good job jobbed.

Then the problems started. I’ve been away from the office a while so haven’t been checking on everything. We were having problems with backing up our live SQL servers. Tried a few things and then thought I’d upgrade to the latest Netbackup Maintenance Pack. That didn’t resolve the issue so I investigated a bit further. I then found that all four drives in the library required cleaning. Oh what joy. Netbackup started playing up big time – and it didn’t matter that Windows could see the tape library – Netbackup refused to.

After spending about 6 hours trying different things, I found a web site that offered a number of suggestions, one being that a door was open which on investigation was found to be the case. I managed to resolve that issue, and to get a cleaning tape recognized which allowed me to clean the drives. Surprise, surprise cleaning the tapes allowed one of the backup jobs to run successfully. Will have to look further into that but need to bear the doors in mind for next time.

Having resolved the problems with the backups, I then downloaded a copy of the Microsoft Office 2007 Office Ribbon. I know it’s really bad but I had a good time doing some of the training on Word and Excel. In the quick 15 minutes that I spent on it (didn’t have a lunch break so thought I should have some me time) I learnt quite a few things I didn’t know.

Anyway, time to relax so enjoy yourselves and I'll write again soon.