Have you ever seen a job in Brightsor Arcserve that is correctly scheduled but won’t run? If you have a look at the job closely in the Job Status screen you will see that, most likley, the backup job doesn’t have a Job ID number. All this indicated that the Job Queue has become corrupt and needs to be recreated.

Prior to any changes it ius always a good idea to save your existing backup job to a file. Simply right mouse click on the job in the Job Status screen and select “Modify Job“. At the modify job screen selecet File | Save As and save the backup job.

So, the first step is to stop all the Brighstor Arcserve Engines. To do this simply right mouse click on the three green circles in the top middle of the Brightstor Manager and select “Stop all Engines”. After a few moments all the indicators should go to red. You can also stop the engines via Services in Administrative tools.

Now locate the :\program files\ca\brighstor arcserve backup folder on your hard disk. Under this folder is a queue directory, which looks something like 000000001.qsd. Right mouse click on this and rename it to something ( ie 00000001.bak ).

If you return to the Brighstor Manager and right mouse click on the three red circles and select “Start all Engines” from the menu that appears. A new queue ( and directory ) will now be automatically created. The queue will be totally empty ( of even a database prune job ), so you’ll need to re-create both your backup job and the normal database prune job. To recreate the prune job you will need to go into “Server admin” and follow a few steps to recreate the standard prune job (I’ll run over this in my next post maybe). If you saved your backup job out previously then you can simply create a new backup job and restore it from the file you saved previously.

Beware that if you are using an autoloader, once you create a new queue and recreate the backup job the link between the media pool and the backup job is broken. You will therefore need to move the media in the autoloader into the correct pool set (scratch or save). We have found issues doing this and recommend that the best bet maybe to erase the tapes one at a time so they are blank. A blank tape should get picked up automatically, reformatted and placed in the right media pool. We also found that sometimes you need to restart all the engines again to get Brightstor to accept the newly created blank tape. Why? We don’t know but we do know that starting and stopping the engines have fixed our problems.