On 8/26/19 5:20 PM, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote: > I haven't looked closely at tape drives in a few years, but others on > this list certainly have in-depth experience with them. I think some of > the specific answers do depend on what tape-drive technology/generation > you are using, so it might help for you to post that info.
It's an LTO-5. > Also, "because of a tape error" is pretty vague; knowing the exact error > message might make a difference in what advice we can give you.... Well, it's been more than 30 minutes ago, so I can't remember exactly what the massage was. But I think it was something about some of the DLEs didn't copy because of a tape failure, but they're on the holding disk. Nothing real specific. > So, if you have a tape that is starting to "go bad" overall, usually the > symptom is that Amanda hits the end of the tape after writing less data > than the expected capacity for the tape -- rather than some sort of "bad > block" error. Yup. That's me. > A related thing to keep in mind is that the writes can fail because > specific spots on a specfic tape are bad... That's what I think is going on. > (amtapetype does have an "-l" option so you could tell it to re-create > the label that is already in the header file on the tape, No, I wasn't wanting to validate the data. Just the tape itself, without destroying the Amanda header -- I think the -l option to amtapetype is what I'm looking for. Stan and Debra have convinced me to bite the bullet and buy a new tape. I've never been in this situation before (the DLT drive used to fail every once in a while, but a couple hours with a jeweler's screwdriver got it going again). Looks like I'm going to have a spare, mildly flaky, tape around. > (Denise mentioned the "amcheckdump" utility. My backup script rewinds and runs amcheckdump. I was told a long time ago "An unverified backup isn't a backup" Thanks all. -- Glenn English
