Orion Poplawski wrote:

I'm trying to user taperalgo LARGEST to force the largest dump to the tape first, but it is not behaving as I expect. Perhaps it only puts the largest image it has at the moment first?

Yes it does.  Taper starts as soon as it has an image available.
When more than one are available, taperalgo chooses one.

What I want is to write the tape in decreasing order of dump size.

You can improve on this by specifying a "dumporder" for your dumpers.
Something like:
   dumporder "SSSSSSSS"
(as many as you have dumpers)

Now you get large dumps first.  It's still not yet in decreasing order,
because you start many dumpers at once, and the first one to finish
of the bunch is put on tape first.  That's usually the smallest of the
large ones (if you understand what I mean).  You could run less dumpers
if that's what you want.

The problem I'm running into is that I tend to have some very large level 0's (almost the size of the tape) and fairly small incrementals. If the tape fills up during the run, inevitably it is the large level 0 that fails, leaving the tape almost unused. See amdump output below.

One way to improve on this too is to split up the large dump in smaller
if you are using GNUTAR.
I do both: specify dumporder, and split up large dump into more
manageable pieces.  My first 2 tapes (with runtapes=3) are filled
more than 95% (AIT-3, 35 GByte native).




--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
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http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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