If what you're saying is correct (which seems the case, sadly) let's propose a 
weird, bit degenerated but still useful case: retention period of one month, 
and a series of failed backups, which fail after writing a lot of data into 
tapes... What will happen if the tapes get filled with incomplete backup files 
before one month, and there's no space for a new job? 
BTW, is there a way to delete all files associated with a job from the catalog? 
Will it do any difference? (I think it was purge files jobid=nnn but not sure)

LDC - Gustavo El Khoury

On 12/04/2013, at 09:55 p.m., John Drescher <drescherjm AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 8:07 PM, LDC - Gustavo El Khoury
> <gustavo AT ldc.usb DOT ve> wrote:
>> Good evening everyone!
>> 
>> First of all, thanks for the great support you've provided to all of the 
>> community! Believe me I've learned and helped so much thanks to this mail 
>> list.
>> Now, to the topic. I'm using bacula to provide backup service to one of my 
>> University's departments. We are using the IBM TS3100 as a tape drive for 
>> the backup storage. Lately our mail partition has grown quite a bit; as you 
>> know mail partitions contain a huge amount of small files, so I've started 
>> to have errors with the batch table and the /tmp partition running out of 
>> space. That issue is solved now, however a couple of full backups have ended 
>> in fatal error! Is there any way of clearing these files from the catalog, 
>> so the space they occupied on the tape(s) may be used for other jobs? I've 
>> run a simple script that takes the jobId of these jobs and then runs
>> 
>> purge files jobid=nnnn
>> delete job jobid=nnnn
>> 
>> But that doesn't seem to increase the free space on tapes. Is there anything 
>> else to do? Note that purging a volume is not helpful, as some backups have 
>> been sliced across more than one tape.
>> 
>> P.D.: I'm not interested in deleting the backup files. I just want to let 
>> bacula know that these files are not useful, and that their space may be 
>> overwritten
> 
> Tapes can not be partially erased it is an all or nothing.
> 
> John

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