On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 11:31:53PM -0500, 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?
>
Short answer - no. If the backups are in a holding disk they can
still be flushed to tapes, but resume a backup no.
Something in your report is amiss. If amanda had successfully
used 6 tapes, it would have completed backing up and taping
one or more of your 300GB DLE's. There is no reason a failed
tape after that would invalidate those backups. And your
report (emailed or available with amreport) would show that.
Also, IIRC, an LTO-1 tape at full speed takes about 1.5-2 hrs
to tape completely. I would expect 6 successful tapes to take
longer than 7 hours, more like 10-15, not counting the estimate
phases. Might the estimate phase have taken 7 hours and then
amanda rejected all the tapes as inappropriate, never writing
to them?
--
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)
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