Thanks, Stan, but I was aware of this, and that's not really what I was
referring to. Maybe I'm a little confused, but when I see this behavior,
wherein a backup is running to a certain volume and then it loads
another and finishes the backup on the other tape, why would it do this
if the first tape had not reached the end? As near as I can tell, if
it's backing up the same saveset, it wouldn't request the next volume if
the previousone wasn't full, so you when it goes onto the next tape, you
should expect to see the previous one as 'full', but in this case it's
not. Instead, it's '100%'. Now, if in fact that tape really does have
more space on it then why is it that if I load that tape in a drive, and
I remove all other identical pool tapes from the library, and
re-inventory so NetWorker thinks this is the only one in there will it
not use this tape when I run a backup to this pool? It won't and it
still insists on asking for a writable tape, and this tape is still
listed as appendable? Seems to me that if it's asking for a writable
tape then it knows that tape is full, so why not report as 'full'? Makes
no sense.

George

Stan Horwitz wrote:
>
> On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, George Sinclair wrote:
>
> >I've noticed that NetWorker will occasionally fail to report a tape as
> >being full and will instead simply list it as 100%. For example, I'm
> >running a backup stream to a particular tape, and NetWorker at some
> >point requests another tape (same pool, same backup stream). Usually, if
> >I go and look in the mount window (GUI), the previous tape will be
> >listed as full under %used. Also, if I run something like: mminfo -vq
> >'volume=name' - r '%used', it will report 'full'. Makes sense, but
> >sometimes this does not happen and the tape instead lists as 100% under
> >both mount window and command line output. Strange! The tape must be
> >full or NetWorker would not have requested another tape to continue the
> >backup on. In fact, I've even tried mounting the tape in the drive,
> >removing all the other writable same pool media from the library and
> >then trying to run a backup to it, and it just sits there and requests a
> >writable tape, so clearly it knows that it can't put any more data on
> >there. Why does it not mark the %used field as full?!!!
> >
> >I should note we are using an older version of NetWorker (6.1.1 on
> >Solaris 2.8 server with RedHat storagenode, same version of NetWorker).
>
> The percentage of tape utilized is an estimate. The estimate is based on
> the type of media and the compression rating for that media. Since its an
> estimate the percentage utilized number can under-report the utilization
> of a tape.
>
> The "full" designation means the tape cannot physically hold any more
> data. The 100% means that 100% of the ESTIMATED capacity of the tape has
> been used, but that does not necessarily mean the tape cannot hold any
> additional data. Tapes that are identified as "100%" utilized can still
> receive more data if the data compresses better than what the estimated
> compression calls for. This will be common in environments where the data
> compresses better than the estimated compression rating for the tape
> drives.
>
> This is why you should try to avoid removing tapes from your tape library
> until they are marked as "full", although there are certainly some good
> reasons to remove tapes from a library earlier than that, such as to ship
> them off-site.
>
> --
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