So at work there is this issue. Prior to my arrival a few years back the company used to use Veritas with a Dell LTO tape drive system for backups. From what I've heard the story goes like this:
Backups start failing here and there, so 1 out of 4 tapes would fail.
This increased to 2 tapes then 3.
The problem seemed to be caused by a hardware issue as the SCSI controller card that was used to connect the tape drive to the server abruptly stopped working.
In full circulation with full backups as well as differentials, there are around 30-40 tapes. They used to be cataloged and tracked i.e. which tapes went with which what jobs but all that paperwork is lost. Also, the server that Veritas used to be installed on has been wiped so all traces of the jobs are gone as well. So in a nutshell I have a whole stack of tapes that are all mixed up...some have data, some have corrupt data, some have failed jobs.
I've been assigned the task to see if data can be recovered from the tapes. I've never really dealt with tape backups so I have no clue how the technology cataloged or indexed the data.
Is this something where if Veritas was reinstalled on a new machine and a new tape deck was purchased, would you be able to put in each tape to figure out what "set" it belonged to?
Is this something where because the original Veritas installation was wiped, that nothing can be retrieved from the tapes?
Is there some service company that can sort all of this out if I just sent them all of the tapes?
Yeah obviously we don't use tape backups here anymore...thank god for cheap HDDs. But yeah if anyone could enlighten me as to how tapes work and what is needed in order for data extraction, it would be very helpful.
Backups start failing here and there, so 1 out of 4 tapes would fail.
This increased to 2 tapes then 3.
The problem seemed to be caused by a hardware issue as the SCSI controller card that was used to connect the tape drive to the server abruptly stopped working.
In full circulation with full backups as well as differentials, there are around 30-40 tapes. They used to be cataloged and tracked i.e. which tapes went with which what jobs but all that paperwork is lost. Also, the server that Veritas used to be installed on has been wiped so all traces of the jobs are gone as well. So in a nutshell I have a whole stack of tapes that are all mixed up...some have data, some have corrupt data, some have failed jobs.
I've been assigned the task to see if data can be recovered from the tapes. I've never really dealt with tape backups so I have no clue how the technology cataloged or indexed the data.
Is this something where if Veritas was reinstalled on a new machine and a new tape deck was purchased, would you be able to put in each tape to figure out what "set" it belonged to?
Is this something where because the original Veritas installation was wiped, that nothing can be retrieved from the tapes?
Is there some service company that can sort all of this out if I just sent them all of the tapes?
Yeah obviously we don't use tape backups here anymore...thank god for cheap HDDs. But yeah if anyone could enlighten me as to how tapes work and what is needed in order for data extraction, it would be very helpful.