Arno and list folks:
Thanks a lot. I'll follow your suggestions. My initial fears are
validated by your comments. The LTO3 tape successfully backed up 300
gigs before hitting the bad section of tape. I had hoped that a
retentioning of the using mt -f /dev/nst0 retention would help, but it
did nothing. I'll use the query to find out what's been saved on the
tape and go from there.
Alan
On 2/3/26 12:48, Arno Lehmann via Bacula-users wrote:
Hi Alan,
Am 03.02.2026 um 18:18 schrieb Alan Polinsky:
My monthly backup has recently run and one of the tapes used in the
backup is obviously failing. Is there a proper way to eliminate that
tape from the pool so it can be replaced?
Sure. And of course it dead simple, provided you already know
everything :-)
I am on Bacula 9.6.7.
Erm... would you think a reminder to updata is in order? ;-)
This time I am trying to rely only on Bacula scripts rather than
going directly to the database and deleting the tape.
You can actually delete volumes from the catalog and the deletion
should also be done on all related entries, but I think this is rather
aggressive to handle the situation. I'd do the following:
1. mark the tape so it will not be used again to write data to:
Read-Only would be a good choice.
2. only if you want to make sure Bacula will never rely on data that
is on this tape, i.e. if you want to also invalidate all jobs that
have data on the tape in question, you should purge the volume.
Personally, I wouldn't, assuming that even a failing tape may be
better to restore from than no backup at all. But see next item.
3. if you would prefer to re-run some or any jobs that have data on
the tape in question, check which ones that are.
There's a prepared query for this purpose in the query sample file,
and I suspect most GUIs can do this, too.
Of course you'd then run the jobs.
4. I would actually not remove the tape from the catalog (its records
are part of your logging / audit trail IMO) as long as anything in the
catalog still refers to it. In other words, just keep it there, keep
it in status Read-Only, eventually it will be pruned of jobs.
5. if you really want to delete the volume information from the
catalog, the purge volume= bconsole command would ensure that all
related information is also properly cleaned up. As stated above, I'd
not do that without particular reasons.
At this point, Bacula would never refer to any data on that volume,
and no job would have it in its list of media, so this is the time to
actually destroy the tape physically, and optionally delete the volume
from the catalog.
6. Thus: delete volume= is the bconsole command.
Note that I do not imply anything about unloading the tape from the
library; I guess you know how to do so and in particular how to update
Bacula's idea of the library's inventory.
Does that help?
Cheers,
Arno
Thank you.
Alan
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