On Mon, 2 May 2005 at 11:24am, Brian Cuttler wrote

> silly question - if you hit EOT while trying to write a DLE to
> tape... don't you know pretty closely how much room remains on
> the end of the tape - at least to within one chunksize if not
> something with smaller granularity ?

If you hit EOT, then by definition there's no room at the end of the tape.  
If you mean "then we can rewind to the beginnning of this record and write 
a DLE that we now know will fit", them amanda doesn't do that for the same 
reason it doesn't append -- we don't trust tape drives enough to do 
anything but write linearly.

In addition, your statement isn't necessarily true.  If you're using 
hardware compression, then a different DLE will compress with a different 
ratio, and may or may not fit in the number of blocks of the "failed" DLE.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University