On Monday 31 October 2005 15:45, Jeff Allison wrote: >On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 09:18 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> On Monday 31 October 2005 07:13, Jeff Allison wrote: >> >Does anyone know how to switch off the tape spanning functionallity >> > in 2.4.5 I've recently updated from 2.4.2 to 2.4.5 and now my >> > backups >> >> never >> >> >complete I have runtapes set to 3 and use the change-manual script. >> >> I don't think the tape spanning patches have been applied to 2.4.5, >> only to 2.5.0 IIRC. Are you sure you don't have a disklist entry >> whose level 0 size exceeds the tapes capacity? > >The biggest DLE is /home/samba which is 11GB uncompressed. > >its got a user-tar dump-type would that kill it
By kill it, please define 'kill'. ISTR from a previous post of yours, your holding disk is smaller than that, which forces amanda to do a direct to tape write. If that write then fails because of EOT, then the file is lost till the next run tries it again. You need a holding disk thats about 150% (or more) of the total backups size so that if a failure occurs, it can continue to use the holding disk subject to the 'reserved' value in your amanda.conf. I reserve enough that a full backup could be stored in it. Here, I have 25Gb of spare on /, with seperate partitions for almost everything else, so that space is not being used up at a very high rate. With drives at about $0.50 Gb these days, enough storage is as close as Circuit City or whomever has the market in your area. Once the failure is handled, then an amflush can continue the backup write phase, starting at the head of the file it failed on IF it still exists in the holding disk. I'd assume that the /home/samba DLE is being software compressed? If both software and hardware are in use, the result will usually be a bigger file by several percentage points, and will possibly overflow even an empty tape. The DDS family of tape drives, and I think many other formats, store the state of the compression in a hidden header on the tape, and generally speaking, if a tape has ever been written to with the hardware compression enabled, its gonna be that way forever, or until you use mt to turn it off while the tape is at BOT, and then force a large enough write to cause the drive to flush its buffer, at which point the tape will become uncompressed. Hardware compression off is the ideal because with it on, amanda has no real clue how much tape has been used as amanda counts bytes sent down the cable to the drive. And this is after any software compression has been done. I have some directory trees that will compress to about 15% of their original size, and others that contain archives that waste gzips time trying to get another 5% squeezed out of them. Adjust the dumptype used for those trees accordingly. I'm rambling, something I'm good at at my age (71) but I hope there is something usefull here too. -- 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) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Free OpenDocument reader/writer/converter download: http://www.openoffice.org 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.
