Legato Networker and DLT Tape Drive Problems

[Patrick Murphy]

I have a remote system running Legato Networker V6.1 on a J6700 running HPUX 11.00. The tape device is a HP SureStore DLT VS80. The problem is that for some DLT volumes, only ~400 MB is stored on them before they are marked full. I would expect 30 to 40 GB. I suspect it is incompatible tapes but the onsite people insist that this is not the case. Has anyone run into this type of problem?

[Rainer von Bongartz]

What is the Networker Administrator GUI saying about the default capacity of the device ???


Regards
Rainer

[Helen French]

First to check media, run a normal OS backup (tar, fbackup, cpio etc) and see how much data it will accomodate. Is it's again 400MB, it's a media compatibility issue. OR you need to check your device drivers, legato configuration etc.

The capacity will vary between different media types. Also, normally when you get repeated media or I/O errors, Legato will mark that media as full.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Has the tapes been used before in a DLT/4000/7000/8000 drive ?

[Bill Hassell]

Extremely low tape capacity is often caused by very slow data rates. How long does it take to store the 400megs? If it is more than a dozen minutes or so, then the data is flowing far too slow and the DLT is not streaming. This not only causes tremendous wear on the drive but if slow enough, partial records with large filler areas will be written. Use a simple tool like tar or cpio to elimnate any config issues with Legato and verify that 400megs is the limit. NOTE: if the backup includes brand new database files with virtually no stored records, 400megs may be the occupied space but the backup space may be 100x larger due to sparse files. Compression will be very high but may still occupy a lot more tape.