Topic: Backup to DDS2 Tape drive with over 4GB data

[Andy]

As a newcomer to e-smith, I just got to say how impressed I am with 5.1.2.  Excellent job guys!   Just feed in the CD, configure it up and its running as a PDC/Samba/e-webmail server for a win2k client network.  Very cool.

Everythings working fine, inculding the addition of multipop and user-manager.  I've even managed a successful backup then restore from my HP DAT 8i SCSI drive.  

The only problem is that subsquently I've added just over 4Gb of data.  The backup now kicks off successfully but then aborts as below, near the end.

DUMP: 90.92% done, finished in 0:13
buffer (writer): write of data failed: No space left on device
bytes to write=10240, bytes written=-1, total written    3339580K
  DUMP: Broken pipe
  DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.


Now a DDS2 Tape drive capacity 4/8GB, should take approx 8Gb (assumes 2:1 compression).  But I appear to be only getting the base 4Gb.  

Question - is flexbackup confiured to use compession?  I note its using plain "dump" mode.  Could this be changed to "afio"?  If so how.  (I've tried editing
/etc/e-smith/templates/etc/flexbackup.conf/10type, but it throws this error when starting flexbackup):

Errors:
 afio not found in $PATH


Any thoughts anyone??

Andrew Avery

[Dan Brown]

To answer your last question, afio isn't found in $PATH because it isn't installed by default.  That's easy enough to fix; just grab a RedHat 7.1 RPM from rpmfind.net and install it.  I doubt that has anything to do with your problem of running out of space, though.

IIRC, flexbackup is configured to use software (gzip) compression, which would largely negate the effectiveness of the hardware compression on the drive (it's hard to compress data that's already compressed).  However, it looks like it only actually wrote about 3.3 GB, so I'm not sure that's your problem.

[Lloyd Keen]

I had a DDS 2 drive using the old 90M 2/4 tapes which stopped working under Taper when I went over the 2gig mark but after switching back to flexbackup I'm now backing up around 3gig using the same tapes.

[Andy]

Dan, thanks for the reply.  I now understand about the gzip compression, and will forget about "afio".  BTW, thinking about this some more I realise 3Gb of this data is Ghost images (i.e already compressed), hence I shouldn't expect to get more than 4Gb +1Gb?.  However I agree that I only appear to be writing 3.3Gb.  I'll try some tape erasing just to check, but any other thoughts would be welcomed!

Lloyd, glad its working for you.  I'll keep trying!

[Kelvin]

Llyod,

You might have just solved my problem as well. I am also using Taper on 90m tapes and for the past few weeks, backup does not complete and I have no idea why. Manually running a small backup job from the console works fine. Nightly backups never completes. It could be that I have hit the 2GB mark like you. I'll check. Maybe, I'll switch back to flex and see if that works.

Cheers,

Kelvin