I got an odd Backup Exec error message on Thursday night that I wasn't able to find in Veritas' knowledge base.

The error code is 0x3a18 - 0x 3a18 (14872). Since it seems otherwise undocumented, I might as well document what I know about it.

In my case at least, the cause of the error seems to have been insufficient disk space. The drive where Backup Exec was storing its catalogs was filling up, and this cryptic error message was the result. When I reran the job that failed, I got an "Insufficient disk space to write catalogs" error in the popup, but not in the system log. That doesn't help you if you happen to not be logged in at the time of the error. Seeing as this error happened at 12:30 AM, I wasn't.

This error was especially nasty because it caused Backup Exec to not recognize that the tape was allocated, so it overwrote the three good jobs it had completed that night with two bad jobs. If there's anything more enraging than a failed backup, it's a failed backup that took a bunch of others down with it.

Many other Backup Exec errors are caused by low disk space. This is so simple that it ought to be the first thing I check, but more often than not I forget. I need to remind myself.

How frequently you run out of disk space on your system drive, of course, increases exponentially with each person who has admin rights on the server.