> > >On 8/30/05, Joe Rhett <jrhett AT meer DOT net> wrote:
> > >>tracking ability, but let's use 3 tapes and write not a single byte to
> > >>them?

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 06:35:12PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> And not using samba, right Joe :))
 
Right.  Straight amanda clients, some Solaris, some Linux, lots of Freebsd,
and some Windows.  But all samba native clients 2.4.4p2 or later.

> >The dumps were flushed to tapes svk17, svk18, svk19.
> >The next 7 tapes Amanda expects to used are: svk20, svk21, svk01,
> >svk02, svk03, svk04, svk05.
> 
> Looks like runtapes is 7.
> 
> >Output Size (meg)           0.0        0.0        0.0
> 
> Nothing made it to any holding disk.
 
This was a flush.  It's already on the holding disk.

> >  taper: tape svk17 kb 34286880 fm 1 writing file: short write
> >  taper: retrying customer-plat1:/.1 on new tape: [writing file: short
> >write]
> >  taper: tape svk18 kb 34227328 fm 1 writing file: short write
> >  taper: retrying customer-plat1:/.1 on new tape: [writing file: short
> >write]
> >  taper: tape svk19 kb 0 fm 0 [OK]
> 
> This looks like the dump was going directly to tape and was too large to
> fit your 35GB tape.  So it was retried and of course was still too big.
> >  customer- / lev 1 FAILED 20050825 [too many taper retries]
 
Yes.  The item it is trying to flush is 53 1gb tar blockfilies.

du -ks /amandadump/20050825
53364786        20050825

> This seems to be an improvement over what I would have expected.
> I recall amanda continuing through any and all runtapes tapes.
> It would have done 7 attempts in your config.  At least now it
> stops after a couple of attempts.
> 
> As to whether amanda's behavior is reasonable, well ...
> 
> It is nearly impossible, perhaps totally impossible, to tell if the taping
> failed because of reaching the end of the tape or a tape or hardware error.
> Is having a backup important enough to continue and try again or should the
> first failure, possibly a bad/worn out tape terminate all the remaining 
> backups?
> 
> I don't think there is a simple answer.  What would be your recommendation?
 
I don't think this is the answer.  The real answer is that the filesystem
it is trying to flush was 53gb in size when you put all the chunks
together.  That won't fit on a 33gb tape.

1. Why aren't we backing up chunks to different tapes yet?  Amanda is the
only backup software which doesn't handle this.

-and more importantly-

2. Why is it trying to back up 53gb to a 33gb tape definition?

#2 is clearly a bug.  #1 is a feature request long overdue, but #2 is
clearly the bug.

-- 
Joe Rhett
senior geek
meer.net