I now have found btape so I set my tape testing on fill this morning. After 12 hours it's only managed 3GB. It is reporting about 70kb/s, which is consistent with the rate it's reporting.
With other programs (Windows 98/Veritas backup and Linux/Amanda) it can fill a 10GB tape in that time (it's spec is 60MB/min and as I recall but didn't note Amanda was not far off - from memory I think it was a about 40MB/min). I have had to set 512 byte blocks (it didn't work with variable size and mt reports that it has 512 byte blocks). Others have also reported this requirement. The drive is on an IDE cable shared with the CDROM (not in use) so it should have full access to the IDE port. With other programs when writing data the tape whirrs continuously in one direction. With btape it is winding one way then silent the rewinding then going forward (that's what it sounds like anyway). That will clearly hit the performance if it doesn't write continuously. The drive is a Travan 20 (10GB native, 20GB compressed) Seagate STT220000A. Clearly the performance is much reduced from what the drive is capable of. Has anyone suggestions (ideally first hand experience of this or a very similar model, e.g the STT28000A 8GB/4GB version) that could help? The drive may be a few years old, but it's capacity and speed (when it's going at it's flat out speed) suits my requirements, plus I have a second drive in another machine which gives me some redundancy in the event of a failure). This is the definition that I added to bacula-sd.conf: Device { Name = Travan Description = "Travan 10/20GB" Media Type = TR-5 Archive Device = /dev/nst0 AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes Offline On Unmount = no Fast Forward Space File = no Hardware End of Medium = no Minimum Block Size = 512 Maximum Block Size = 512 } -- Peter Crighton ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users