Help! Issues writing LTO3 tapes using tar...

[jwrong]

Morning,

Got a really urgent issue...have 15 tapes to write and not a lot of time to do it...

I've split 5TB up into separate folder, less than 400GB in size, and have been trying to write them to tape using the following command

tar --ignore-failed-read -cvPb 20 -f /dev/nst0 *dir*

The majority of the data gets written to tape, but then it fails near the end with the following error:

tar: /dev/nst0: Cannot write: No space left on device
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I've rebooted the machine the LTO3 drive is connected to and the machine I'm running the command from.
I've check to back sure the size in bytes as opposed gigabytes is below 400, closer to 350-375.
The first tape, which funnily enough had the largest amount of data, wrote fine, but I've tried the second folder twice, and the third folder once, and get the same error on both.

Is there a maximum number of files that an LTO3 tape can hold? regardless of the overall size of the file? as the largest file count is about 400,000 files

Any ideas?

Thanks
J

[Rubberman]

Isn't this something you should take up with the tape drive manufacturer? AFAIK, LTO is just a serial tape device and the number of files you write to it should be irrelevant. To it, you are just writing a bunch of bits to it. It is the Linux software that interprets the data and reports what's there (tar, cpio, etc). So, for some reason, the tape subsystem thinks, and is reporting, that it is full. I'm not sure about LTO, but most tapes have to be initialized, or if they are pre-initialized, have to be reinitialized if they have been written to previously, or rewound at the least.