Automated tape drive cleaning
Hi,
How do people manage their tape drive cleaning with Acronis Backup 12.5?
We have automated cleaning on our Lenovo (IBM) TS3200 library. (library detects the drive needs cleaning and after the tape is eventually ejected it cleans the drive).
If Acronis is writing a backup that spans 2 tapes it gets a scsii sense error when loading the 2nd tape and fails the backup.
The funny thing is a manual re-run of the job fails because of a tape in the drive - the one that the previous attempt tried to load into the drive.
It's not that funny though when the job is 30 hr replication that fails at the 29th hour.
Do you people manually run cleaning tapes on a regular basis or use the error and task handling settings? I had task retries set but that didn't work. I've just set the "error handling" to retry a couple of times over a few minutes. Is there another way?
I know a couple of the other backup products manage the tape cleaning themselves, detecting the tape drive cleaning request while others seem to work with the library managing the cleaning. I'm not into manually cleaning tape drives; I don't have the time and it increases the wear on the drive.
Thanks,
Albert

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Hello, I suppose this is not about the tape/backups cleanup, but about a tape driver cleaning.
Unfortunately this is a known issue that will be fixed in the next versions (internal # ABR-123799).
Until that I suggest to mount a cleaning tape to a drive via UI to forcibly perform clean drive operation and avoid such situations.
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Thanks Andrey,
This is good news about the next version(s). The best way is definitely allowing the library or backup software to manage the tape drive cleaning. It minimises the wear on the tape drive heads. Putting a cleaning tape through a drive before it is needed is not recommended.
I am in the process of set up a new monitoring system but but if the drive gets elevated errors in the middle of the night or on the weekend it may not get addressed for a while and it disrupts the work-life balance for the staff. Computers are to be our tools, not our masters.
Thanks again,
Albert
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