On Tuesday 26 October 2004 17:28, Joe Rhett wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 06:35:44PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> If the file cannot be restarted from byte 1 on the next tape, eg
>> the system cannot back up to the start of the file being written,
>> then something is seriously wrong with the method being used.  In
>> the case of no holding disk, then it seems setting one up would be
>> the answer.
>
>These are all stored on a holding disk, and I see the same problem
> during amflush of that holding disk.
>
>What's even more curious is that the holding disk files are broken
> up into 1 gigabyte segments.  So 30-something of these would fit on
> a single tape, and if EOT was hit before tape-end, then only <1gb
> would be lost.
>
>Instead, nothing is being recorded as written to the tape.

The chunking into 1GB pieces is a fop to broken filesystems that 
cannot handle an individual file the size of todays tarballs might be 
as they head for the tape.  I believe that amanda adds them all 
together when planning the backup and if it will fit or not. If in 
fact amanda were to be redesigned to file the individual chucks, then 
no more than one chunksize of wasted tape would ever happen.

One potential solution to your problem is to break the disklist up 
into many more entries, each reaching into a partition by one 
directory level, and choosing by the contents of that subdirectory 
whether or not to use software compression.  Its no great use to try 
and do further smunching of a dir full of rpms, tar.gz's, or .bz2's.  
So they go onto the tape without spinning gzips wheels, with the 
possibility of actually makeing them a few percent bigger in the 
process.

I currently have about 50 entries in my disklist so that each one, or 
at least enough of them to count, are small enough that amanda can 
use one of them for padding to fill out the days targeted backup 
amount in her attempts to arrive at a consistent amount of data to 
save each night.  Some are less than 10 megs total.  I try to keep 
any one of them no bigger than an iso to burn a cd with.  My system 
is currently still working on the balance point so there is yet an 
occasional overflow as witnessed by a post I made earlier today 
asking for comments.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.