On Sunday 03 April 2005 22:41, Nick Jones wrote: >I have a DDS-3 drive with DDS pass through enabled (should mean > compression is off), but I keep getting amstatus results that > produce this: > >taped : 1 46524k 33639k (138.30%) ( 0.18%) > tape 1 : 1 46524k 33639k ( 0.39%) DailySet102 > If thats a DDS3 drive, those figures look pretty bogus to me. A DDS3 should have a native, compression off, capacity of around 12GB. And, even if the drives builtin compression was on, that still doesn't compute as it assumes a compressor good for >4x, and hardware compressors aren't *that* good that I know of, 2.6 at best.
On thing that should be more widely known is that these drives all keep a compression status flag in the tape recognition header, and regardless of your wishes, if when the drive does its tape recognition phase stuff when a tape is inserted, it finds that flag set, the compressor will be turned on regardless of any dipswitch or software settings you think are in effect. The only way I've found to actually turn it off once its been enabled is to rewind the tape, turn it off, and then force feed write enough data to make the drive flush its buffer, at which point the compression status will be tallied as it exists when the write is forced. Typically thats done by a sequence like this, using the non-rewinding device: ---- rewind the tape with mt read the first 'label' block out to a scratch file using dd rewind the tape with mt set the compression off using both variations of this using the mt command rewrite the label block using dd dd enough data from /dev/zero to force the buffer flush, usually around 1.5x the rated size of its buffer. rewind the tape ---- Now, you should be able to eject it, and reinsert it without turning the flag back on. Now, to verify its off, (remember to save that label block file for this) run an amtapetype session using the -e 12GB (see the manpage for exact options) as one of the options. This should give you a true raw tape figure after a while, possibly several hours, and it should also tell you in that output if the compression is on. Now, because the run of amtapetype will destroy the label, rewind that tape one more time and dd that label block back to it again using the rewinding device this time, thereby restoreing amanda's ability to use the tape when it comes around in the schedule. >I do have a few clients that do client side compression with tar. > Is this just a case where the client compression makes the backup > bigger or am I some how doing double compression? (In this case > it's a linux machine's root partition). Which shouldn't be exactly a dir full of .bz2's, it should be very compressable, as in to < 40% of its original size in my experience. >Thanks in advance for any suggestions. > > >-- >Nick -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
