Tom,

I've looked into this, and it is indeed a bug -- errors writing tape labels 
are not treated as robustly as errors at other times. I'll write up a patch 
for this, but it may not help you unless and until you upgrade, because taper 
has been completely rewritten since the last community release.

--Ian

On Wednesday 31 October 2007 14:31:44 Tom Hansen wrote:
> Ian Turner wrote:
> > Tom,
> >
> > What is runtapes set to?
> >
> > --Ian
>
> The runtapes parameter is set to 25.
>
> -Tom
>
> > 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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