On Tuesday 15 February 2005 02:39, Frank Smith wrote:
>--On Tuesday, February 15, 2005 17:44:32 +1100 Jamie Wilkinson 
<jaq AT spacepants DOT org> wrote:
>> We've got one problem machine that has about 90GB in one DLE, and
>> our tapes are 100GB LTO1s.
>>
>> Of course, once a cycle, the server decides it can only write
>> maybe 5 DLES out of 150+ to the tape, because one of them is
>> 80GB+, and so all the other dumps end up being reported as
>>
>>   FAILED [dumps way too big, 1 KB, must skip incremental dumps]
>>
>> which afaict means that amanda doesn't even attempt to back up
>> this DLE because it knows it's not going to fit it on the tape.
>>
>> But I've got a ton of free space in the holding disk.  What I want
>> to know is, is there an option to tell the server to do the dumps
>> anyway and hold them, so later I can come along with another tape
>> and flush them?
>
>If you have plenty of holdingdisk space, I would think they would go
> there. Even with the default reserve of 100%, you should still get
> the incremental. You might have to look in the debug files to see
> why they were completely skipped.
>
If the dumps are too big, and the holding disks reserve is at the 
default of 100%, the dump *will not be done*.

Set the reserve on the holding disk, if you've got a ton, to something 
like 30%, which will let it do fulls till there is only 30% of the 
holding disk left.

>> In general, we only need one LTO1 a day, this particular DLE is a
>> freak statistic well outside the standard deviations of the other
>> DLE sizes, so doing a flush once every cycle is more appealing
>> than allocating two tapes per run.

Can you, by using tar, break that dle up into smaller pieces?  This 
will aid amanda quite a bit in arriving at a schedule thats usable.

>Just because you set runtapes > 1 doesn't mean Amanda will use them
> all. I keep runtapes set to a number higher than what normally gets
> used per run, and have autoflush set true.  That way even if I have
> a tape error and it all goes to disk, the next run can flush it all
> and do the backups as well without running out of tape.
>  If you normally only need one tape, then that's what it will
> normally use, even if you have runtapes set to 2 or 3 or whatever. 
> The higher number just allows it to use additional tape(s) if
> needed.
>
>> At this stage, splitting this DLE into smaller chunks is also not
>> an option, in case you were wondering.
>
>That would have been the next suggestion.

It still is. :-)

>Frank

-- 
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