My tape status says suspect. What does that mean and what do I do?

A quick explanation of what the suspect status means, and what to do about it.

The tape status of suspect means that the system had found issues with the tape and believes that it might be compromised in some way making it a risk to the data that it holds.  When it marks the tape as suspect, it locks it so that no more data can be written to the tape.

We recommend that data on a suspect tape be restored back to the Platform server, then written to a new tape to prevent any further data loss.  During the restore if you encounter any errors, you can try a recovery operation that will copy the entire tape contents to the _PXS folder on a storage group. Click here to learn about recovery.

You should contact support so that we can run tests on the tape and the hardware to ensure that it is a fault with the tape and not the drive.  We do not suggest using this suspect tape unless it was cleared and tested for next usage.