I would start by looking at you logs files. daemon.log if you are running NW < 7.4.x or daemon.raw if your are runing >=7.4.x
Could they be waiting for more tapes?
Check your library status.
You may need to stop all your current jobs and restart you NW services on both you server and your clients.
If you running on windows its worth checking your server event viewer.

I was gone for a week. The past two days it's been writing to tape non stop so i'm guessing that may be it. I'll keep you posted and thanks for the ideas! think I left my brain on vacation

You can confirm this by checking the progress on Monitoring/Logs.

There are a lot of reasons why this may be. Your first point of call is to look at the logs - just check what you are seeing in the GUI - check the alerts tab in Monitoring as this may indicate what it is waiting for and the operations and log tab - a recurrent error may be visible there - if not go to the daemon.log/raw and examine that.
Did anything complete successfully?
Did the problem happen at a specific time?
If you stop a backup and start it again does it run?

This is empty. It was waiting to write to tape. It's written to tape for two days straight.

and the operations and log tab - a

Log tab is empty and operations shows clean bill of health. I did a system reboot after the tape was done writing.
- if not go to

I can't make heads or tails of this mess but it LOOKS ok. The messages were all 'group completed abnormally'. This is because they would just run and run and run so I had to stop them to let it write to tape.



Not sure i will let you know! thanks for all the awesome information

It would APPEAR that i've gotten this worked out with all your' help. I ended up doing a couple of manual backups to verify connectivity at the least; my netware servers are backing up (one is done actually!). I restarted the server on one and it worked but my other servers I can't offline during the day so now I must ask: which services do I need to stop and restart on my other windows boxes? I believe that will do it for me

I'm not sure how this works but ALL of you have given me correct information so I just want to convey my thanks. Things seem to be getting back to normal. At least if it happens again i'll know what to do! thanks everyone again