Basics – Why is NetWorker asking for a Default tape?

So you’ve got a pending message sitting there in NMC, NetWorker logs and nsrwatch:

Waiting for 1 writable volume(s) to backup pool 'Default'...

Backtracking why something is asking for this can be tedious and time consuming. You can dig through logs, or you can do process listings, etc., but here’s the thing: if it doesn’t jump out at your almost immediately, there’s a good chance it’s a client initiated backup, and that may not be as easy to spot.

To me, this problem falls into one of those simple choice categories where you can either:

(a) Spend an indeterminate amount of time working out what is asking for a Default volume; or

(b) Just simply label a volume into the Default pool and see what gets written to it.

To me, there’s practically no choice in the situation. If I can label a volume into the Default pool and see what’s writing, I can then stop that backup by contacting the system owner, or finding and hunting down the backup process and stopping it myself.

While I appreciate it may not appear a graceful solution, we have to remember that sometimes it’s wasteful to spend a large amount of time to solve a problem one way, when there’s a simpler (albeit slightly uglier) way to immediately isolate the cause of a problem.