Tag Archives: Seagate Backup Exec

Seagate Backup Exec 14.x reuse improperly allocated tape

Let’s say you have a DLT drive and you are running a backup job like this:

Full

Incremental

Incremental

{eject}

Next tape

etc.

Every so often, due to power outages, mistakes etc. a tape may eject out of the drive. So you pop it back in but the job won’t run, it ejects the tape and asks for a tape that is over writeable and the current tape is already (previously) allocated and you can’t use it.

There is an easy solution for this, but you’ll need to re-run your full backup job.

How to address it:

  1. With the current tape out, cancel the current job, so that the jobs re-queue as queued in the future
  2. pop the tape in
  3. go to the Storage tab, click on the DLT drive
  4. pick INVENTORY -> Inventory Now
  5. Let that complete
  6. pick Erase -> Erase now
  7. restart the FULL job and let it complete.
  8. the next incremental job will then run as scheduled and you are back on track with the backup cycle.