Poor Tape Management

[ekisner]

This is an issue that seems to be cropping up regularly - I'm about to open a support ticket for the underlying problem causing this behaviour, but I figured I'd voice my thoughts here on the matter as well as the underlying logic could use a tweak.

My weekly tape job failed on one of the underlying target jobs. Everything else was successful, save for one, which failed. When next the underlying job ran, the tape job evaluated that there were files that needed to go to tape.

The problem, is that it allocated an entire tape for 50GB of data. The previously used tape had 1.1TB left on it, so it easily could have accommodated this.

The GFS pool has "do not append" selected, which is of course why it did what it did.

B&R should, in my opinion at least, append to a tape when the job is supposed to be on the same tape as it would have been on. Luckily in this case it's only a weekly job, so in a month I'll get that tape back (and I'm not going to redo the entire job for 50GB worth of backups). But this has happened on monthly passes, and it has forced me to redo an entire monthly pass to reclaim 3 wasted tapes.

[Dima P.]

Hello Erik.

Thank you for your post, it makes total sense. I mark it as feature request and and we will discuss it with the team. Cheers!