I'm running vtapes on a new server.  The vtapes
are split across two external disk drives.

Realizing that some tapes would not fill completely,
I decided that rather than define the tape size to be
exactly disk/N, I would add a fudge factor to the size.

Things worked exactly as anticipated.  The install has
now reached beyond the last tape which ran out of disk
space just before it ran our of the last tapes' length.
And as usual, the taping restarted on the next vtape
on the disk with remaining space.

But running out of disk space caused me to look more
closely at the situation and I realized that the failed
taping is left on the disk.  This of course mimics what
happens on physical tape.  However with the file:driver
if this failed, and useless "tape file" were deleted,
it would free up space for other data.

Curious, I added up all the sizes of the failed, partially
taped dumps.  They totalled 46+ GB.  That is substantially
more than I dump daily.

Has anyone addressed this situation?

Before you ask, no I've not gone to tape-spanning (yet).

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)