Multi-tape span failure

BACKGROUND INFO: I have Amanda 2.5.2p1 running on Ubuntu linux 6.10,configured to backup several large (300Gb +) filesystems spanningseveral tapes. I have a robot changer, LTO1 tapes (100Gb capacity) andI used:


   tape_splitsize 3Gb
   fallback_splitsize 256m

(An unrelated issue: I couldn't seem to be able to get split_diskbufferto have any effect so the chunks were all 256mb. No big deal, it wasnot a bottleneck.)

After much time configuring, everything seems to be working properly,and on my first big run, it successfully spanned six tapes and wasnearly finished. Then it grabbed tape 7, which I had inadvertently leftin "write protect" mode. Unfortunately, at this point Amanda completelyaborted the entire 800+ Gb backup and left nothing in the index, thuscompletely wasting 7+ hours of backup time.

This behavior is unexpected and bad. What if a tape simply goes badduring a run? If I'm running 7 or 8 tapes each backup, I don't want tolose the whole thing if there's an error on the last tape!

I _thought_ that Amanda was programmed to simply go to the next tapewhen a tape error occurs. In this case, if Amanda _had_ gone to thenext tape, it could have completed the job, since tape 8 was a good tape.

MY QUESTION: Is there any way to configure Amanda such that such a tapeerror would simply go to the next tape, instead of the worst possibleaction, which is to abort the whole job?

Short of that, is there any way Amanda could start up from where it leftoff?


Thanks.

--
Tom Hansen
Senior Information Processing Consultant
Great Lakes WATER Institute
tomh -at- uwm.edu
www.glwi.uwm.edu