Tom,

What is runtapes set to?

--Ian

On Wednesday 31 October 2007 00:31:53 Tom Hansen wrote:
> BACKGROUND INFO: I have Amanda 2.5.2p1 running on Ubuntu linux 6.10,
> configured to backup several large (300Gb +) filesystems spanning
> several tapes.  I have a robot changer, LTO1 tapes (100Gb capacity) and
> I used:
>
>     tape_splitsize 3Gb
>     fallback_splitsize 256m
>
> (An unrelated issue: I couldn't seem to be able to get split_diskbuffer
> to have any effect so the chunks were all 256mb.  No big deal, it was
> not a bottleneck.)
>
> After much time configuring, everything seems to be working properly,
> and on my first big run, it successfully spanned six tapes and was
> nearly finished.  Then it grabbed tape 7, which I had inadvertently left
> in "write protect" mode.  Unfortunately, at this point Amanda completely
> aborted the entire 800+ Gb backup and left nothing in the index, thus
> completely wasting 7+ hours of backup time.
>
> This behavior is unexpected and bad.  What if a tape simply goes bad
> during a run? If I'm running 7 or 8 tapes each backup, I don't want to
> lose the whole thing if there's an error on the last tape!
>
> I _thought_ that Amanda was programmed to simply go to the next tape
> when a tape error occurs.  In this case, if Amanda _had_ gone to the
> next 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 tape
> error would simply go to the next tape, instead of the worst possible
> action, which is to abort the whole job?
>
> Short of that, is there any way Amanda could start up from where it left
> off?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Tom Hansen
> Senior Information Processing Consultant
> Great Lakes WATER Institute
> tomh -at- uwm.edu
> www.glwi.uwm.edu
-- 
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