Hi!

I know this matter has been discussed here serveral times before,
but scanning the archive and reading the online docs I could not
find answers to my specific problem.

My situation:

Due to non-optimal configuration I got into this:

.) I thought to used software compression only, but maybe
  the DDS3 tape drive tried to compress the data too.

.) My tapedrive configuration in amanda.conf is this:

define tapetype DDS3 {
   comment "HP C1537A"
   length 11738 mbytes
   filemark 392 kbytes
   speed 1018 kbytes
   lbl-templ "/etc/amanda/D1/HP-DAT-Elimpex.ps"
}

  As I understand it, it specifies only the uncompressed size
  of DDS3 tapes, which I use...

.) I managed to produce a DUMP which is of this sice in the
  holding disk:

uschi:/silo1/amanda/20050422 # du -ks *
12055028        sonja._silo1.0

.) Amanda dump and flush try to write this to the tape, and
  fail, because it is too big.


Ok. It IS TOO BIG, but now my questions:

.) Why did this dump even got created ?

.) How do I remove it - I know I have to split this area to
  backup it with amanda but I dont want to break the whole system
  and start from scatch...

.) What about this switching DDSx DAT tapes from compressed to
  uncompressed ? Somebody mentioned a script I cant find.

  I tried this procedure (/dev/nrmt0 is a HP DDS3 drive on Linux):

  mt -f /dev/nrmt0 datcompression 0
  mt -f /dev/nrmt0 rewind
  dd if=/dev/nrmt0 of=label.dat bs=32k count=1
  mt -f /dev/nrmt0 erase
  mt -f /dev/nrmt0 rewind
  dd if=label.dat of=/dev/nrmt0 bs=32k count=1
  mt -f /dev/nrmt0 offline

  Will this be sufficent to switch the tapes to uncompressed ones ?

.) Is there any way to insert a command in amanda that is executed
  "just before the tape is accessed" e.g. to switch the drive
  to uncompressed ?

.) Why does amanda produce "empty" tapes if a dump is too big ?
  It would be nice if the tape would be at least be reused for the
  other dumps waiting to get taped ...


And now to something completely different:

Is there any way to execute a command "just before and after" a
"disk" is backuped ? This would be nice to e.g. shut down and start
servers which may change this data inbetween ...


Hopefully somebody is able to help on this,
My amanda keeps producing empty tapes and I am running out of
holding disk space.

Peter Mueller
WOTLmade