On Tuesday 26 October 2004 17:28, Joe Rhett wrote: >On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 06:35:44PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> If the file cannot be restarted from byte 1 on the next tape, eg >> the system cannot back up to the start of the file being written, >> then something is seriously wrong with the method being used. In >> the case of no holding disk, then it seems setting one up would be >> the answer. > >These are all stored on a holding disk, and I see the same problem > during amflush of that holding disk. > >What's even more curious is that the holding disk files are broken > up into 1 gigabyte segments. So 30-something of these would fit on > a single tape, and if EOT was hit before tape-end, then only <1gb > would be lost. > >Instead, nothing is being recorded as written to the tape.
The chunking into 1GB pieces is a fop to broken filesystems that cannot handle an individual file the size of todays tarballs might be as they head for the tape. I believe that amanda adds them all together when planning the backup and if it will fit or not. If in fact amanda were to be redesigned to file the individual chucks, then no more than one chunksize of wasted tape would ever happen. One potential solution to your problem is to break the disklist up into many more entries, each reaching into a partition by one directory level, and choosing by the contents of that subdirectory whether or not to use software compression. Its no great use to try and do further smunching of a dir full of rpms, tar.gz's, or .bz2's. So they go onto the tape without spinning gzips wheels, with the possibility of actually makeing them a few percent bigger in the process. I currently have about 50 entries in my disklist so that each one, or at least enough of them to count, are small enough that amanda can use one of them for padding to fill out the days targeted backup amount in her attempts to arrive at a consistent amount of data to save each night. Some are less than 10 megs total. I try to keep any one of them no bigger than an iso to burn a cd with. My system is currently still working on the balance point so there is yet an occasional overflow as witnessed by a post I made earlier today asking for comments. -- 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) 99.28% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attorneys please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.