>can somebody enlighten me a little about the ./tapetype command?
>What determines the "blocksize" and what's meant by "estsize"??

The "blocksize" is the size of each tape block you are going to tell
Amanda to use.  Prior to 2.4.3 that was fixed at 32 KBytes.  At 2.4.3 you
can specify it in the tapetype section of amanda.conf.  Some tape devices
work better (faster) with larger block size, so you now have that option.
However, changing the blocksize could affect the tape capacity, hence
the added parameter to tapetype so it can do a test that matches what
Amanda will be doing.

As to estsize, Gene Heskett is sort of correct.  The first pass of the
program writes files that are 1% of estsize.  It keeps doing that until
it gets an error (typically at end of tape).  Since writing long files is
generally faster because the drive is kept busy and there are less tape
marks written, giving it a good estimated size helps that (the default
is 1 GByte, so the default file size for the first pass is 10 MBytes).
But it is perfectly OK to just ignore that parameter.

>Axel

John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, jrj AT purdue DOT edu