Failure to relabel tapes interferes with SQL restores

Question

We have a problem with an SQL restore - we have been running test manual backups and restores from; this has been unsuccessful and at first we believed it was down to 'impersonation' errors we were seeing in the logs ¿ however we now believe this was not an issue and that there is a known bug for 5.2 with this problem. The problem appeared to be that as the restore had to first backup the transaction logs it was doing this at level Manual and since we had no corresponding pool wanted to use a tape from the Default pool. Once a tape was labelled into the Manual pool the restore completed successfully, the same occurring for test backups. However we had plenty of expired tapes available which were not in the Default pool but had the 'relabel to other pools' box checked in their Media Pool resources, tape drives available but nothing was happening - it required manual intervention on the Networker server to label a tape after which the restore immediately started running. The person doing the restore is not on the Networker administrators list. The question is, should we expect this behaviour or not and if so what is the explanation (I was curious whether it could be down to the person doing the restore not having rights to relabel tapes?)? Is there a way we can avoid this problem in future without having to leave a pool of Default tapes available for the off chance of such a restore occuring?

ble1 · Answer

If those are expired that it should taken it under assumtion that pool requested for backup is set to recycle from and pool with your expired tapes is set recycle to.

DavidHampson · Answer

Okay, I have an answer on this one. The DEFAULT pool cannot be set to relabel to or from other pools so with no expired or appendable DEFAULT tapes available and with auto media management turned off it was unable to get a tape to backup to. I had made the wrong assumption that the DEFAULT pool was always set to relabel to and from other pools!

NetWorker

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