Notes on Travan tape drives
The Travan model of tape drives are problematic and have a variety of issues under Windows.
We believe that the Windows drivers for Travan drives are buggy.
We are now recommending against using Travan tape drives because of the large number of problems that our users are having with this particular type of hardware.
- Advantages:
- the tape drive units are comparatively cheap
- IDE models of Travan drives are available and are easier to setup than SCSI drives
- Disadvantages:
- blank tapes are expensive
- the tape drive unit is noisy and slow
- tapes require periodic retensioning
- most Travan drives do not have hardware compression
Documented problems with Travan drives are listed below.
Problems with the Certance / Seagate STT220000A? tape drive
The Seagate 10/20 gig
STT220000A? seem incapable of appending to tape. This causes problems when
BackupAssist tries to perform a Phase Two backup. Messages like this are common:
==============================================
Phase Two backup log
Backup Status
Operation: Backup
Active backup destination: Travan
Media name: "Media created 1/1/2004 at 1:00 AM"
Error: The device reported an error on a request to space
backward by file marks.
Error reported: Hardware failure.
There may be a hardware or media problem.
Please check the system event log for relevant failures.
----------------------
The operation did not successfully complete.
----------------------
Explanation: BackupAssist will perform a Phase Two backup to backup the following data:
- Exchange Server
- SQL Server
- Open files that are not exclusively locked
The Phase Two backup is performed as an append operation to the end of the tape (after the Phase One backup has completed.)
Resolution: There are three ways of working around this error:
- Purchase a more reliable tape drive, such as a DDS tape drive
- Turn off the Phase Two backup by disabling the backup of Exchange Server, SQL Server and Open Files. (To turn off the open file backup, go to the Options Tab of your backup job.)
- If you are only backing up Exchange Server, and not SQL Server, then try moving the Exchange Server backup to Phase One, instead of Phase Two. (Click on the Exchange tab in your backup job, and click on the appropriate radio button). Also turn off your open file backup. Now everything will be performed in the Phase One backup.
- If you are backing up Exchange server and the System State on Windows 2003, we recommend setting up one job to backup Exchange Server to a file, and then backing the rest of your system in a second job. Schedule the first job to run several hours before your second job. This way, you will have backups of both Exchange and your System State, and work around the problem of appending to tape.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION: One of our clients has reported that the latest driver available from the Certance website fixes this problem.
The name of the driver he uses is sttravan.sys, and it is version 1.3.
Thanks to P. Zanstra from The Netherlands for kindly supplying this information.
Problems with the Certance / Seagate STT3401A? tape drive
On Windows XP and 2003 Server, the Travan tapes in the
STT3401A? drive may be detected as
MiniQIC? instead of Travan.
Explanation: A bug exists in the Windows driver for this tape drive where the tape in the drive is detected as the wrong format
Resolution: In the Media Pool setting in the Options tab of
BackupAssist, select
MiniQIC? instead of Travan.