On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 at 1:07pm, John Oliver wrote

> On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:11:50PM -0500, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> > That's correct, though.  Only 564MB made it to tape successfully.  The 
> > 18GB is that 564MB plus 17.5GB worth of hda2 that amanda wrote before it 
> > hit EOT.
> 
> I want to see if I understand this correctly... since my holdingdisk was
> only 2GB, and the filesystem in question is ~18-19GB, amanda was trying
> to write it directly to tape.  Further, I'm guessing that, because the

Up to here you are right on.

> data wasn't going through the holdingdisk, that that was precluding
> compression, which is why I was running out of space (since my drive is
> 20/40).

That's not quite right.  Compression happens in the pipe, either on the 
client end or server end (depending on your dumptype).  Holding disk or 
not has nothing to do with it.

> But, then... the drive is supposed to be compressing, isn't it?  Maybe
> I'm still confused... :-)

You must not mix hardware (done by the drive) and software (done by 
amanda/gzip) compression.  Compressed data will actually expand when 
passed through the tape drive's compression mechanism.

That may very well be what's going on here.  If you want to continue using 
software compression, turn off your drive's hardware compression.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University