Tape

Description of tape pools and operations with them in Acronis Backup Advanced (Acronis Backup & Recovery Advanced)

Troubelshoot tape usage issues

This article applies to:

  • Acronis Backup Advanced

Introduction

Acronis Backup Advanced provides advanced capabilities in setting up tape storage and using it for backup and replication. Incorrect settings and usage may lead to unexpected results and problems. This article describes the Tape Management functionality, settings, contains correct and incorrect usage examples and provides troubleshooting steps for issue resolution.

Click "Detect tape devices" to update the information about the attached tape devices

How to upgrade tape vaults from Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 to Acronis Backup and Recovery 11

Acronis Cyber Protect 15, Acronis Cyber Backup Advanced 12.5, Acronis Backup Advanced 11.7 and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 support most of virtual tape libraries (VTL) e.g. Falconstor VTL.

(!) The virtual tape libraries from Cristalink Firestreamer VTL are not supported.

 

Acronis Cyber Backup products do not take into account tape hardware compression while calculating space on tape media.

Symptoms

Retention rules on tape do not work: old backups are not overwritten.

Cause

Specifics of product design.

When retention rules are applied to an archive, the backup that should be retained is not deleted from the tape but is marked for deletion. Backups stored on tapes are not deleted until the tape is overwritten. 

Symptoms

  1. You create a backup to tape
  2. You move the tape to a different device
  3. After Full Inventory and Rescan, you go to Tape management and check the capacity of the tape.
  4. Incorrect tape capacity is shown: tape is empty, or capacity is negative, or only a small portion of the tape is occupied compared to backup size:

Symptoms

The tape size under Acronis Tape Management is smaller than the tape capacity specified on the tape box.

Solution

Most tape drives now include the automatic data compression that is performed during the copy-to-tape operation. Because of that, there are two capacities values that can cause some confusion: 

Symptoms

Tape erase operation fails with the following error:

The parameter is incorrect

Symptoms

  1. You installed Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 Update 4 (build 12730 or higher)
  2. When you try to open an encrypted backup on tape to browse files/folders, you are not prompted for a password.
  3. You receive the following error:

Password is required

Symptoms

  1. You back up a machine to a tape,
  2. Backup fails with:

    Data are absent in cache

Symptoms

New tape is used to continue backup when there is free space on previous tape.

OR

Backup archive uses more tapes than required by its size: e.g. 14GB backup archive uses 17 tapes of 1 GB size. 

Symptoms

  1. You run backups to tape drive.
  2. Data to backup is enough to fit one backup to one tape, e.g. 3 GB of data and 5GB tape
  3. You set up cleanup rules to keep 1 backup and run cleanup rules before backup:

  4. If the tape contains an earlier backup, backup operation fails with an error similar to:

Symptoms

Activity (e.g. backup or replication to tape) fails with the following error:

Cannot use the tape drive without a properly installed driver

Symptoms

After update to build 16180 or 16318, backup to tape fails with One standalone tape drive have to be selected along with option 'Overwrite tape in standalone tape drive' when the option Overwrite a tape in the stand-alone tape drive when creating a full backup is enabled.

Symptoms

  1. You created a backup to a tape directly attached to a machine with Agent for Windows/Agent for Linux,
  2. You added the same tape as managed location to a Storage Node;
  3. Recovery or browsing archives from the tape via Storage Node fails with:

The storage node cannot access backups created in an unmanaged location

Cause

Product design limitation. Currently recovery of backups created by Agent on tape by Storage Node is not supported.

Solution

You can use one of the following workarounds:

Symptoms

  1. You deploy a virtual appliance to ESXi host 
  2. You create an Entire VM backup plan to tape (either connected directly or via Storage Node) and activate Enable file recovery from disk backups stored on tapes backup option
  3. Backup is created successfully
  4. When you attempt to recover files from this backup, no files/folders are shown. Only Partition 0 empty folder is shown in the backup:

In some rare cases there can be some issues with Tape drive detection in Acronis Media.

Symptoms

You booted machine from Bootable Media. In tape management you click on "Detect tapes" and no (or not all) tape drive(s) appears in the list.

Follow step-by-step instructions below to troubleshoot the issue.

Symptoms

Tape rescan finishes with error:

Cannot read data from one of the tapes. Ensure that all the tapes are online and not corrupted

Use a pre-backup command to run inventory before backup

Following tools should be used to analyze the status of the tape device on a system, check device's details, work directly with a tape device and view the contents of an ARSM (Acronis Removable Storage Management) database.

You may be asked to provide the output or the result of one of these tools while troubleshooting issues with tape devices.

To list the installed tape drives:

Symptoms

After an update from build 25729 to Update 2 (build 26981, 27009), tape pools disappear from Tape management. Only default tape pools are available (Free, Imported and Unrecognized).

At the same time, tape pools are still visible on the Backup storage tab.

Cause

Issue in the product.

Solution

This issue has been fixed in Update 3 (Build 28035). Please update to the latest build.

This article applies to:

  • Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5
  • Acronis Cyber Protect 15 pre-Update 1

Symptoms

During backup to tape you get the following interaction "Cannot find tape to continue backup". You have a tape with free space in the drive or in your library, but after clicking on "OK" you see the interaction come back.

Cause

The root cause of the issue is that the available tapes are not in the Tape Pool specified as backup target. 

Symptoms

 1. Backup to tape fails with an error:

The storage media is write protected

Symptoms

The error message "the semaphore timeout period has expired" can occur in different situations:

  • during backup when Acronis Cyber Backup is actively writing files to a network storage
  • during backup or replication to tape

Cause

'The semaphore timeout period has expired' is a network and in some situations a tape hardware error.

Symptoms

Backup to tape fails with the following message:

No more data is on the tape

Symptoms

 You are creating a backup to a tape. After some data is saved to the tape (less than tape capacity), you get this warning:

Cannot find a free media in the pool.

Troubleshooting

1. Download SPTD tool from this article: Tape Detection tools 

2. Open Command Prompt (in Search, type cmd -> right-click cmd.exe and select Run as administrator).

3. Run this command: 

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