Hi Arno, thanks for your help, I'll reply to Martins suggestions as soon as I get some results.
>> I've been struggling with Bacula for a single backup installation for >> almost 4 months now. Although installation and configuration are well >> documented I'm still confused by two problems we can't get solved: >> 1. Even with brand new tapes, on two different tape drives, using >> continuous cleaning cycles, the tapes that used to store between 11.5 >> and 13 GB uncompressed data on a windows machine only take about 8 GB >> using bacula (same drive, same tapes). > Same set of files? Yes, identical data. >> 2. Up to now a verify at level "VolumeToCatalog" always (!) brings up at >> least one error of the type "Error: block.c:317 Volume data error at >> 3:2817! Block checksum mismatch in block=2817 len=64512: calc=8fe728a4 >> blk=bd217fe3" in the middle of the tape. > That indicates a real problem. > Is the error always at the same position (the 3:2817 information) or > does the position vary? It randomly varies, cleaning doesn't help, and I'm pretty confident about it not beeing solely a hardware problem. >> - How can it be, that a single error renders the whole tape of a backup >> useless ? Why does bacula not continue to verify the other 80% of a >> backup and tells something like "block error while reading ..., missing >> files ...." ? > Difficult question... the basic idea is "if I find a single data error > I decide the whole tape is no longer reliable". For backup / restore > purposes, that is reasonable IMO. For verifies, you're probably right > that a warning and continuation would be better. For a backup solution I consider this out of the question. The only software that may read a tape which holds - for whatever reason - the last copy of some data should leave the decision which data is reliable and which is not to the admin in charge. Furthermore I would expect a backup solution to implement robust streams and ECC, that correct simple storage errors automatically and report all others, but continue to check/restore as much as possible. This shouldn't be criticism to the bacula team by no means as we haven't checked the code of the tape format, yet. > Also, a look into the system log might reveal something interesting > like lower-level SCSI or tape problems that the driver reports. This > sort of problems, naturally, can not be corrected by Bacula, only > reported. syslog shows the following error st0: Error with sense data: <6>st0: Current: sense key: Medium Error Additional sense: Unrecovered read error which pretty much stops any further activity by bacula. IMHO bacula should report the error and continue with the next readable block. >> We run about ten other backup installations using commercial tools and >> Amanda. So far, bacula was the one easiest to set up among the free >> tools, but after 4 month of testing we haven't got single backup which >> runs through and verifies without an error. > If you consider four months of testing easy to set up I don't want to > know what a difficult deployment looks like at your site ;-) ;) First: I said free tools (and using amanda or tar/gzip scripts on forty changers/drives would take a little more than that in testing, I guess). Secondly it's an old public library which doesn't have the money you would need to spend on an out-of-the-box commercial solution for the given setup (see comment below). The culprit on that installation is, that we can only test during weekday nights and it's not a full time project. >> I know, that DDS is not the idal choice as we run some SLR, LTO and VXA >> solutions, but for that particular case the tape drive has to be DDS3 as >> the customer in question has a large library which only handles DDS and >> MiniDV tapes. > MiniDV as data storage tapes? Did I say anywhere ? It's a public library which archives video and audio tapes using MiniDV and digital data using DDS on the same catalog, sponsored by some Italien company back in 2001. We neither implemented nor suggested this setup, it's a "grown" structure. The nice thing about bacula was the native availability of the digital catalog in a easily accessible SQL database, so we could easily integrate it into the existing search engine. > Which library and drives would that be, > if you can share that information? There are 23 "ancient" Libra libraries with the sony drives (8 slot changers) and 17 single HP drives in two racks plus our test server with two drives and one robot. > (And, slightly related, wouldn't the customer be better off if he > replaced a big DDS library with a smaller LTO one?) Yeap, if you send the money ;) Thanks for the directions, I'll post the results on Martins and your hints soon. Carsten -- -------------------------------------------------- Yoo GmbH Tel.: 037 328 809 40 Zellwaldring 51 Fax : 0351 79 79 900 D-09603 Grossvoigtsberg Germany www.yoogmbh.de Registereintrag: Amtsgericht Chemnitz, HRB 181 852 Geschäftsführung: Carsten Ralle -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. 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