Hi Kern,

Thanks for your comments.

Kern Sibbald wrote:

> By the way, increasing the Minimum Block Size is NOT the way to increase the 
> Maximum block size.  In general one should *never* set the minimum block size 
> unless you have an older brain damaged drive.  In increasing the Minimum 
> Block Size, you virtually guarantee to waste tape for no good reason.  The 
> way to increase the maximum block size is to use the Maximum Block Size 
> directive, which I previously thought was rather obvious ... oh well.

Oops. This was not obvious to me, despite having spent rather a lot of 
time studying the (excellent) documentation. and consulting my best 
friend, Google. I guess though that it's slightly more obvious now that 
you have pointed it out, and I have contemplated it for a while :) (and 
it should not be in Google for people like me with similar predicaments 
in future ;)

> Unless you have a critical problem of speed, I don't particularly recommend 
> starting with block sizes other than the default.  It would require a lot 

Unfortunately I do have a critical speed problem with bacula. I need to 
back up several terabytes of date in ~5 million files. With the default 
block size Bacula is *far* slower than our current Legato Networker at 
backing up this data to LTO 2 tape. Bacula *will not* write any faster 
to LTO 4 any faster than ~22MB/sec under any circumstances. Legato will 
write to tape at ~25MB/sec, or even a lot faster if it's easily 
compressible.

I have tested Bacula using the fifo backup device to /dev/null and I 
believe I have comprehensively shown that there is no other bottlenecks, 
e.g. system speed or catalogue speed. I can pull in data at over 
800Mbit/sec (over a GigE network) from our backup servers.

> I would be interested to hear the experience of users who are using larger 
> block sizes.  First about the throughput they get, but also about the number 
> of tape read errors they have, and any problems associated with running 
> multiple simultaneous jobs.

I have so far backed up and restored data from running two multiple 
simultaneous jobs using a large block size. I will be doing much more 
testing while I try and get this system into production.

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