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Acronis Not Utilizing Second Drive In Tape Library

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Hello, I have an HPE StoreEver MSL4048 Tape library. Backups to tapes are going smoothly except that only one drive is been used. Is there a way I can make Acronis make use of the two drives as this slows down the backup process?

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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello Damola,

Welcome to Acronis forums!

Please check if your second tape drive correctly detected in Windows Device Manager.

If everything is ok, then please test this drive with Acronis Hardware Compatibility Tool for Tape Devices (! Please do not use Backup/Restore option for test purposes since a random tape with existing backups could be overwritten).

Please also consult this KB article for more details: https://kb.acronis.com/content/45442

Hello Maria,

 

So I did check the device manager to check if the drives are been detected correctly and it was.

 

I also did the check with the compatibility tool and during the test, the second drive was actually used too. Though at a point, the test failed at

[ TEST   ] Ejecting from changer.
[ ERROR  ] Cannot find an import slot without tape.

 

Any other suggestion on why the second drive isn't been used during backup?

 

I attach a screenshot and log of the test.

Attachment Size
554470-205105.png 34.61 KB
554470-205108.txt 8.92 KB
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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello Damola,

thank you for providing additional details.

The only error that detected is:

[ ERROR  ] Cannot find an import slot without tape.

which does not influence on writing a backup.

Is there a way I can make Acronis make use of the two drives as this slows down the backup process?

Please note that tape drives are used consistently for writing a backup. Two tapes can't be used simultaneously for the same backup. However, two separate backup tasks can use two tapes: one per task.

Thanks for your time Maria,

 

The attachement below describes what is actually happening. Three plans were activated, only one would started at a time thereby using only one drive.

Attachment Size
554949-205308.png 21.47 KB
554949-205311.png 7.98 KB
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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello Damola.

I recommend that you select the required type drive for a specific backup plan in Backup options -> Tape management -> Use the following device and drive

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Comments: 29

Hello.

Do your plans run on the same machine? Looks like one is backing up and two others are waiting when the first one will finish. As I remember one agent can execute only one plan at time.

What kind of data do you back up? How many agents are there?

What vaults do you use personal or centralized? You can utilize both tape drives with two agents and centralized tape vault (on Storage Node). Agents will run its own plan and send data over network in parallel to tapes through ASN.

 

Hello Alexander,

I think that could be the cause of my issue. What the plan does is pick backups which have been written to disk, then writes those backup to tape. The agent handling this is residing on the management-srv.

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Posts: 0
Comments: 29

Do you use replcation plans for copying backups to tapes?

No replication is configured at the moment