PRINTING BACKUP IN CASE OF PRINTER FAILS

[former_member183984]

What's the effective way to achieve printing without interruption in case a printer fails? So that we don't need to print the spool again.

Lets say a batch printing of 2000 spools a night, and a printer has issues such as low ink or technical error, how to auto forward the printing to other printer? How can I set backup printer?

[AK31 · Accepted solution]

One option I know of is that you can create a printer pool (if the print server is a Windows server) and you can assign one or more printers to the pool. The pool is basically a printer name which has more than one printer assigned to it. In this case you would have two printers responding to the print jobs. But: load balancing would occur which means (example: two printers standing next to each other) some documents will be printing on the left and some on the right printer. This can be a problem if you need them to be printer in the correct order. Also: the print job on the defect printer will not be moved to the other printer. So if you have one print job with 2000 pages, this solution will not help you.

HTH

Andreas

[Ranjith418]

Hello,

you can try to use PAL (Printing assistant for Landscape)

thanks,
Ranjith

[bxiv]

@Ranjith how are you using PAL to accomplish having to avoid a hardware printer outage?

[bxiv]

I have noticed that with Windows print servers as long as you have successfully spooled and printed to the print server it will hold all output until a new printer is assigned to the queue.  I have had cases where end users have opened a printer to swap out a toner and needed printers re-mapped, all I had to do was assign a new printer and all the on hold documents were sent to the new printer.

What is best in my case is that Basis is not responsible for the Windows print servers, so any after hour calls are routed to the server team and I get a full night of sleep!