Soft errors are correctable write errors generated when writing to tape. All tapes will give soft errors because tape is a magnetic media that will almost always have some bad segments on it.
So If the data segment has a write error, the tape will be advanced to another section of tape and the same data segment is written again. This is a Soft Write Error. The repeated write action will take more time and more tape space.
To understand how many soft errors are acceptable per tape you need to speak to the hardware manufacturer or hardware maintainer.
Possible causes of excessive soft errors :
Tapes that have lots of bad segments
Degraded head on Tape drive
Determine if the excessive soft errors are down to tape drive or tapes
If tape drive replace tape
If tapes remove the tapes that generate large numbers of errors
Check each drive to see if one particular tape drive is logging excessive soft errors compare to the others. To do this Right click each drive, select status, select drive statistics and in here we can see read and write errors logged ion the tape drive. Make a note of the errors and monitor the increase over the next week. If one drive is seen to have a large increase compared to other drives you would need to call you hardware maintainer to replace this drive.
To help with this in netvault you can edit the media- general report to include errors, run it and keep a copy.
Then run your backups for a week run the report again and compare the errors if you see certain tapes with large increase in the error count, I would replace these tapes.
How to create job that reports tape errors:
1/ open netvault reports, right click Media-general and select edit/view job
2/ under components select Media –General and select the edit button
3/ select the field selection tab, select from the available fields “drive write errors” and add
4/ modify the component title to Media – general Errors and save
5/ modify the job title to Media – general Errors and save
6/ close the edit window
7/ you should now see a new job in reports window called Media – general Errors this will report errors logged on tapes as well as other facts about the tape.
