Hi,
Nigel Allen schrieb:

Hi All

I'm experiencing an odd problem with a USB DAT drive that keeps running out of space. Apologies for the length of the post.

The drive is supposed to be 36 / 72 GB.

Ok this means amanda can put 36 GB of data after softwarecompression on it,
forget the 72GB value, its marketing.

Here's the kind of thing I see when I run a level 0 dump.

These dumps were to tape DailySet1-18.
*** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [No more writable valid tape found].
Some dumps may have been left in the holding disk.
Run amflush to flush them to tape.
The next tape Amanda expects to use is: DailySet1-19.

FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:

mail.XXXXXXXX.com.au mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 lev 0 FAILED [out of tape]

STATISTICS:
                          Total       Full      Incr.
                        --------   --------   --------
Estimate Time (hrs:min)    0:04
Run Time (hrs:min)        14:44
Dump Time (hrs:min)       11:22      11:22       0:00
Output Size (meg)       33927.1    33927.1        0.0
Original Size (meg)     50710.1    50710.0        0.0

Avg Compressed Size (%) 66.9 66.9 10.0 (level:#disks ...)

Filesystems Dumped            2          1          1   (1:1)
Avg Dump Rate (k/s)       849.1      849.1        8.5

Tape Time (hrs:min)        0:00       0:00       0:00
Tape Size (meg)             0.0        0.0        0.0

Tape Used (%) 0.0 0.0 0.0 (level:#disks ...)

Filesystems Taped             1          0          1   (1:1)

Chunks Taped                  0          0          0
Avg Tp Write Rate (k/s)     7.4        --         7.4

USAGE BY TAPE:
  Label              Time      Size      %    Nb    Nc
  DailySet1-18       0:00       32K    0.0     1     0
NOTES:

planner: Forcing full dump of mail.XXXXXXXX.com.au:mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 as directed. taper: tape DailySet1-18 kb 31022240 fm 2 writing file: No space

                                 ^^^^^^^^
ok, according to this, it wrote about 30 GB to the tape,
then it ran into EOT
this smells to me as if you have hardwarecompression enabled and are doing
softwarecompression.
That is s BAD idea, as it will lead to what you see, a loss of roughly
6 GB of tape-space, as the already compressed dump-image will EXPAND
by the hardwarecompression.

So first disable hardwarecompression of your Tapedrive, then try again.

And it tells you, you'll have to splitt your dumps in chunks using tar
and exclude-/includelists, as the level 0's are to big for your tapes.
another solution could be using a Tapechanger and tape-spanning.

left on device
  driver: Taper  error: "[writing file: No space left on device]"
  driver: going into degraded mode because of taper component error.
  big estimate: mail.XXXXXXXX.com.au sda1 1
                est: 64K    out 32K

Here is the amanda.conf file with everything not used snipped out:

org "DailySet1"         # your organization name for reports
mailto "amandabackup"   # space separated list of operators at your site
dumpuser "amandabackup" # the user to run dumps under

inparallel 4 # maximum dumpers that will run in parallel (max 63)

dumporder "sssS"        # specify the priority order of each dumper

taperalgo first # The algorithm used to choose which dump image to send

displayunit "k"         # Possible values: "k|m|g|t"
netusage  600 Kbps      # maximum net bandwidth for Amanda, in KB per sec
dumpcycle 4 weeks       # the number of days in the normal dump cycle
runspercycle 20         # the number of amdump runs in dumpcycle days

i would lower this, as it tells amanda:
"do a level 0 of all disklist-entrys at least all 20 days.

have a nice day
Christoph