How do tape backups work?

Question

We are backing up to tapes but more often then not the tape will be spat out and we will have an error like The requested media failed to mount. The operation was aborted. which from what I can tell could mean the drive is full (doesn't looks like it as the drives ate ~700GB big).

We sometimes get this errors but other times it works.

We are running Windows Small Business Server 2003 SP? (the latest SP and updates)

But my question is, when I put in a tape each day (a tape for each day of the week) does it start from the start of the tape and start copying over data or does it continue off from where the last backup filled it up to?

I'm quite new to tapes and how they work, so links to good resources about how it works would be great too.

In fact, it might even be implementation-specific. You'll need to provide quite a bit more information to describe what you're doing there before we can help you. — Magellan, Mar 21 '12 at 20:50

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 21 '12 at 20:46

Tapes are a serial access (as opposed to random access) medium.

Miniature pixies engrave each bit onto a tiny section of the physical media; they can't be everywhere on the tape at once so they have to do the work in order.

The Wikipedia article on tape storage is a good resource for general questions.

Your question needs far more detail (the specific error you're receiving, what backup software you're using, your configuration) before it could be answered.

Only three of the above statements are true.

You forgot about the Norns and how they fight the mighty demons from the land of Flip Bit. — Wesley, Mar 21 '12 at 20:48

How do tape backups work?

1 Answers1