The Frugal Tech

Overview

Backup Exec is throwing the error Buex: Failed – Physical Volume Library Drive not available. Backup Failed, errorCode=-536837876. Prior to this error a tape was “stuck” in the tape drive. Holding the eject button in for 15 seconds resets the tape drive and the tape is ejected; however, subsequent backups cannot find the physical library (tape drive). (more…)

Overview: The business was using a tape drive to back up data from various systems using Backup Exec. The tape drive was experiencing problems, so rather than purchasing another tape drive the decision was made to purchase SSD drives.

Purchasing SSD drivers for backup purposes is considered the norm. However, there are a few considerations before moving from a tape drive to a RDX device.

1. If the organization needs to be SOX (Sarbanes – Oxley) compliant and are currently using a tape drive, the tape drive will need to be in working order for audit purposes since the previous seven years’ worth of backups are on tape.
2. RDX devices do not provide the data compression of tapes. If the data being backed up to tape was 200 GB with a compression ratio of 2:1 the backup takes 100 GB on tape but will take 200 GB on an RDX device.
3. The up-front costs of implementing a RDX solution is lower that a tape system, but the SSD disks tend to be 2 to 3 times the price of comparable tapes. Expect to get one year out of the SSD disk before it needs to be replaced, so over a period of time the costs associated with a RDX solution will equal the cost of the tape solution.
4. Many RDX solutions are USB in nature where tapes drives are generally SCSI, so the backup will be limited by the USB speed. As the SSD disk becomes fragmented, expect the backup to take a longer period of time to complete.

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Problem: V-79-10000-11226 – VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot technology selected returned: “Unexpected provider error”. Ensure that all provider services are enabled and can be started. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

The following volumes are dependent on resource: “C:” .

Analysis: Since this was a VSS writer issue on a Windows 2008 R2 server, the first thing I ran was “vssadmin list writers” to see what writers were failing. The failing writers were all Windows system writers like the WMI Writer. So I re-registered the writers running a batch script, but you can accomplish the same thing by restarting the server. (more…)

They have been experiencing electrical storms over the past couple of weeks. When I went into Backup Exec the tape drive was offline. I brought the tape drive back online and ran a tape erase to test and it was successful. Sometime just restarting all the Backup Exec services works just as well.

In Backup Exec will at time have issues with tape drives. Data inconsistency can be due to a couple of reasons:

1. Bad media.
2. Bad tape drive (more…)

This problem is related to Backup Exec’s GRT (Granular Recovery Technology) having issue with an Exchange log file. The best method to resolve the issue is to disable GRT within the backup job. Let the backup run and check the logs again after the backup job has run. You should see that the bad log files have been removed and the only log files left are those that were not committed to the Exchange mailbox database.

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