[Bacula-users] Data Loss on Tapes

Dear Bacula Users,

I have had an occasional, long-running problem with bacula. Every now and then, when I am trying to restore a file from tape, I find that the tape has apparently corrupted.

The symptoms vary - sometimes there is an error at some point through the tape, and sometimes (suspiciously often) it seems to have lost the bacula label right at the start. These tapes were new, and the rate of these errors is far higher than I can attribute to bad tape manufacture, etc.

These tapes spend most of their time write-protected and out of the library, so I am assuming that whatever it was, happened when the tapes were first in the drive and being written.

Is this a known bug? Is there some sort of condition that led to currently loaded tapes being written at the wrong position, for example? Caused by a reboot or power-cycling the drive?

This system has had a history of problems, particularly scsi problems.
Bacula: 2.4.2 (built from source); upgraded a couple of times from older versions, eg. bacula-mysql-2.4.0-1 (rpm) and 2.0.3 before that.
I use bacula to back up a small number (1000s) of large files (common size of about 50GB)

Secondly, if a small section at the start of a tape is bad, is there any way to recover parts of data from later in the tape? Something along the lines of:
mt fsf 10
dd if=
...feed files through bacula s/w...?

I really need this data, if it is at all possible to get it back.

Thanks for any assistance,

Glen

--
Glen Davison davo AT sirca.org DOT au
SIRCA Pty Ltd Ph (02) 9236 9133

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