John Harmon <jim@telecnct.com>
Roger McGraw <roger@ptac.com>
Bismark Espinoza <bismark@alta.jpl.nasa.gov>
The general comment was to clean the tape drives.
The tape drives are cleaned before each backup. I could see that this might show up as a problem on one drive if operating in a really dirty environment - which we're not. The drives are in a climate controlled data center.
Jim Harmon wrote:
>How many times have the 90 meter tapes that "fail" been used?
>
>Some (all?) dat drives will detect a usage count encoded at the
>beginning of the tape, and if the tape has been used more than 30(?)
>times, it warns you that the tape is too old to use.
>
>I'd look in your manual for this kind of thing.
Some of the tapes are old. They are on a 45 day rotation cycle, so 30 cycles in probably not possible (I've only been here two months, so don't know for sure).
I think what I will do is recommend that RFC purchase all new 120 m DDS 2 tapes for these systems and let it go at that. If there was a clear and definite solution I would follow that, but there doesn't appear to be.
Ira
!