Score:2

Tape capacity and backup routine in Linux

es flag

I have a HP Ultrium 5-scsi tape device on a Linux server and I'm currently using a HP LTO-5 Ultrium RW (model C7975A) tape and I have a couple of questions regarding this setup and does it work. 1 - It seems this tape can reach 3TB for storage considering compression. I'm not using any compression to backup a specific folder. Without compression, how much data this tape can hold? I couldn't find this information anywhere. 2 - I'm trying to do a backup from a folder that has 329GB and it's asking to insert a second tape to continue the backup process. Is this normal? The command I'm using to start this backup is tar cvMf /dev/nst0 var/Data/backup 3 - I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 on the server.

Can anyone share a light on this? I don't have much knowledge on this.

Score:1
vn flag
  1. LTO 5 has 1.5TB physical capacity without any compression.

  2. Not normal, and looks like there is already some data on tape. It is possible to check free space on tape - Determine remaining capacity of LTO tape

Maluco avatar
es flag
Thank you for your help @batistuta09. To mitigate any chances of a tape with some data in it, I opened a brand new tape and tried the same thing. It's keeping asking for a second tape. For testing purposes I inserted a third tape and now it's asking for a fourth tape. I really don't know what's going on here.
Maluco avatar
es flag
I double checked the amount of data I'm sending to tape and it's ~329GB total.
batistuta09 avatar
vn flag
try: tar cvf /dev/nst0 var/Data/backup
batistuta09 avatar
vn flag
"M" in tar is for multi-volume, maybe it is a reason.
Maluco avatar
es flag
I believe that solved this problem. The process finished without any errors. Thank you very much for your help! I would upvote your answer but I don't have enough rep to do it.
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