--On Thursday, September 12, 2002 11:03:48 +0800 Alvin Ko <alvinko AT ae-server 
DOT com> wrote:

> I used amanda 2.4.2p2 with a DDS-3 tape drive to do a full backup of my
> Linux last night. In the amanda.conf file, I used chg-manual as the changer
> with 3 tapes. My /export/home folder has 23GB data. I had labeled three
> tapes (Tape-01, Tape-02, Tape-03) and then start the backup. 3 hours later,
> she asked me to insert backup tape into slot 1. When amdump completed, I got
> the following report.
> ---
> These dumps were to tapes Tape-01, Tape-02, Tape-03.
> The next 3 tapes Amanda expects to used are: a new tape, a new tape, a new
> tape.
> 
> FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
>   localhost  /export/home lev 0 FAILED [too many taper retries]
> ...
> NOTES:
> ...
>   taper: tape Tape-01 kb 12013824 fm 7 writing file: No space left on device
>   taper: retrying localhost:/export/home.0 on new tape: [writing file: No
> space left on device]
>   taper: tape Tape-02 kb 12004832 fm 1 writing file: No space left on device
>   taper: retrying localhost:/export/home.0 on new tape: [writing file: No
> space left on device]
>   taper: tape Tape-03 kb 0 fm 0 [OK]
>   driver: Could not rmdir /mnt/hdc1/20020911: Directory not empty
> ---
> She could not backup my /export/home folder into multiple tapes. Anybody
> knows why?
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Alvin K. T. Ko

Amanda can not backup any filesystem that is bigger than a single tape.
Evidently your tapetype has a size listed greater than the actual
capacity of your tape or Amanda wouldn't even have tried.  You mentioned
DDS3 which has a 12GB raw capacity, and that is about how much taper
says it wrote before getting the 'no space' error.  If your data is
highly compressible, you might be able to get it to fit using compression,
otherwise you will have to split your disklist entry for /export/home
into a few (or several) subdirectories that will each fit on a tape and
use tar to do the backups (dump usually either won't back up subdirectories
or will be unable to keep track of the dumpdates for them).

Frank

--
Frank Smith                                                fsmith AT hoovers 
DOT com
Systems Administrator                                     Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                             Fax: 512-374-4501