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Setting up NTBackup...

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by mdfreeman

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Here is my dilemma...
One of our clients purchased a server and made a bad decision on the size of tape drive to have installed in it, now they can no longer get their entire backup on a single tape. They have emphatically stated that they are not willing to spend money on new hardware, so I have decided to run a weekly full backup of the entire hard drive spanning two tapes and nightly differential backups the rest of the week. We would like the backup to start automatically at 11:00pm on Thursday nights; on Friday morning, the person assigned the tape changer task will swap out tapes and finish the backup. How do I set up NTBackup to prompt for another tape instead of ending the backup job unsuccessfully as it does now. I would like very much NOT to give the tape changer the administrator password, also, is there a way that the messenging service could send the tape changer a prompt over the network to change tapes for the verification process?

5 replies

by retro77

Just backup to disk. Buy an external 500GB hard drive and bam, done. The hard drive is way more reliable than tape.

by mdfreeman

As I stated in the original post:
"They have emphatically stated that they are not willing to spend money on new hardware"
This was the first suggestion I made to our client and they dismissed it completely. They will not spend money on additional hardware. On a side note, this is the reason I absolutely DESPISE tape drives. They are clunky, fickle, and manufacturers use the annoying dual capacity labels (which is what caused this whole problem in the first place.)

by ddtlestar

If you could allow the server left logged-on and not locked by [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] (but by a KVM lock or simply lock the keyboard inside a rack...)

Create a batch job to be run at a "Backup Media Pool" rather than a particular Tape.

Create a VBScript file to check whether the "Change Tape Prompt" comes up at the server screen, if so, run a "net send" batch file to notify the Tape changer.

Create another batch job to call the VBScript file and schedule it to be run every few mins within a certain period (say, 0600-1700).

by suvajit.ibm

Hi,
The same problem we solved by adding an extra switch /UP with ntbackup backup command in the script file.Please follow the link for more information-http://www.jsifaq.com/SF/Tips/Tip.aspx?id=10481
Hope it will work. Pl. let me know.

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