Occasional CPF6702 Media Errors on Magstar 3570 tapes

Our MAPICS back ups, which we perform five days a week, fail every two or 
three months, due to CPF6702 media errors.

I have yet to see the cleaning indicator even be activated on this machine, 
but when the errors started occurring last fall, we started cleaning the 
3570 every Monday.  We still get the errors.

We have one tape for each day of the week so I would not think it is an 
overuse problem.

In the beginning of the year, an IBM CE came out and looked at the machine 
and had us load a  PTF or two.  We still get the errors.

I do take the back up tapes home with me each night in a little padded 
envelope.  Could  the tapes be picking up contaminants through the handling 
of them?  Also, some MIS personnel used to put stock labels over the 
barcode labels. Some of the stock labels have since been removed, leaving a 
pretty clean bar code label but with some residue.  Could a dirty label 
cause a media error?

After the most recent failure, I successfully initialized the tape in 
question.  I was told that if it can be initialized, then it is actually a 
good tape.  Is this true?

Is it normal to have this frequency of errors?  If not, does anyone in this 
great midrange-list community have a solution?

Bryan Burns
System Operator
Echo, Inc.
Lake Zurich, IL
Burnsbm@echoincorporated.com


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