Low Tech Backup

I and many of my colleagues use NTBackup for small to midsize deployments. I have used Veritas BackupExec (now Symantec) and still do at some clients. I have found that the simpler you keep the backup system, the greater chance that you will have good backups. I can’t say how many times I was left scratching my head looking at BackupExec saying to myself “what the heck is it doing?” or “why does this have to be so confusing?”. NTBackup is the cure for this. Sure you have to do some scripting to tie multiple systems together, but we have found it works really well. Today I found my first NTBackup problem. It manifested itself with the following error: “The requested media failed to mount. The operation was aborted.” I was reminded of the BackupExec days. What the heck? I found in the device manager that there were multiple instances of the same tape drive. I changed the SCSI ID of the tape drive from 7 to 8, and rebooted the system. Ok, that fixed the multiple tape drive issue, but what now? Still not backing up. Same error. Then I stumbled on this article about the RSM database. That’s the database that Removable Storage uses to manage media and media pools. As soon as I rebuilt the database, all is well. Long live NTBackup!