> 
> I have no confirmation of this but I've always had the sneaking suspicion
> that the fragments of a failed job still occupy the tape, but are unusable,
> until that tape expires.

That's pretty much a hard requirement by the tape technology.  Even if
it wanted to, NB couldn't reuse the space in the middle of the tape
without erasing later (valid) portions.

Even if it could, there's no way of knowing exactly how big a "space" in
the middle of the tape is in many cases, compression or not.  Tape isn't
like a disk with defined blocks.

Presumably it could reuse space at the end of the tape, but that seems
like a lot of coding and quite complex to get a pretty small benefit.

> One option you have is to use bpduplicate to copy the good image to a clean
> tape and then expire the original tape.

Yup.


-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
         < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >