Media Set Showing 3.7 TB free, still asking for more media

[Grey_wolf85]

Hello,

 

I have this one question that is driving me crazy. Our company recently upgraded to Retrospect 9. We have LTO3 tape drives, and have one particular backup that is a couple 5-6tb's in size. Hardware compression is on. It's showing space used 4.7tb, space free 3.2 (well it did...more on that later) I set it to run overnight and it failed because it needed more media.

 

'Edit the Selected Member' is greyed out, which I'm assuming because it is a tape and not an optical drive.

 

On a secondary backup set (not the one in question) I selected 'Keep the catalogue compressed' and it doubled in size. When I unselected it, it doubled in size again. It is currently at 4,821,560.5tb's.

 

I can't remember what I did with the primary media set, but that is now showing 83.3 tb free, which is obviously incorrect.

 

Anybody else experiencing this? Remedies or possible solutions?

 

Thanks in advance

 

-J

[twickland]

It is currently at 4,821,560.5tb's.

Where is this information displayed?

[Grey_wolf85]

It is displayed under media sets (Menu on the left)

[Lennart_T]

Tip:

Upper case B is bytes.

Lower case b i bits.

 

Lower case k is kilo = 1,000.

Upper case M is mega = 1,000,000

Upper case G is Giga = 1,000,000,000

Upper case T is Tera = 1,000,000,000,000

 

Can you post your values again, this time with the proper suffix? For instance, I can't believe your catalog file is over four million terabits.

[Grey_wolf85]

I apologize about the incorrect format.

 

I have a media set with 11 tapes. Each tape is an LTO-3 400/800GB, when I added them to the media set, it only read as 744.2GB totaling what should be around 7.5TB

 

Last night I ran the script for this media set, and it didn't complete because it wanted a 12th member. It was still reading 3.7TB free. @Lennart, I read your response to someone else about editing the selected member, but the pencil is greyed out. I can only assume it is because it is a Tape drive and not an Optical drive, but I do not know. My questions to the Google Gods came up unclear on that.

 

We have two media sets per tag (we rotate them out) and the secondary set had been set up, but not used yet because we had just purchased those tapes. So I was experimenting on the unused set first. I selected 'Keep the Catalogue Compressed', and all it did was quadruple in size. When I unselected 'Keep the Catalogue Compressed', it quadrupled again. (I'm typing it directly from Retrospect (I took a screen shot but cannot figure out how to post it, the image selection only gives a URL))

 

So now it is showing the free space of 4,821,560.5TB Free. It is Retrospect 9.0.2 (107) running on OS X Server.

[Grey_wolf85]

Finally find out how...I knew it was possible!

[twickland]

I have a media set with 11 tapes. Each tape is an LTO-3 400/800GB, when I added them to the media set, it only read as 744.2GB totaling what should be around 7.5TB

 

Last night I ran the script for this media set, and it didn't complete because it wanted a 12th member. It was still reading 3.7TB free.

Retrospect's estimates of free space available in a tape media set are very general and unlikely to be met. There are a lot of factors involved in how much data can be written to a tape, including how compressible the original files are, whether the data can be fed to the tape drive fast enough to avoid the tape's having to backhitch, etc. You should assume, in the absence of reported tape errors, that the tape is full whenever Retrospect requests a new member.

 

@Lennart, I read your response to someone else about editing the selected member, but the pencil is greyed out. I can only assume it is because it is a Tape drive and not an Optical drive

The purpose of editing a member is to prevent Retrospect from using all of its capacity. This applies only to disk drives.

 

I selected 'Keep the Catalogue Compressed', and all it did was quadruple in size. When I unselected 'Keep the Catalogue Compressed', it quadrupled again.

Catalogue compression only affects the amount of space the media set's catalogue occupies on whatever hard drive volume you're storing it. This information is not displayed in Retrospect; you can view it in Finder. What you're seeing in the Media Sets window is the amount of data Retrospect thinks is in the media set, which is...

 

So now it is showing the free space of 4,821,560.5TB Free.

...apparently completely whacked.

 

If you quit the console, stop the engine, and then restart/relaunch both, do these figures change at all?

[Grey_wolf85]

The purpose of editing a member is to prevent Retrospect from using all of its capacity. This applies only to disk drives.

 

Thank you! I was leaning in that direction but was unsure.

 

If you quit the console, stop the engine, and then restart/relaunch both, do these figures change at all?

 

I actually just tried that, to no avail. The Exabyte library is on a SCSI interface and we cannot necessarily restart as the computer is also our gateway.

 

And I kind of figured it was more of a guestimate, space wise, but it states that the tape is full at different intervals. (When I added each tape I went through, completely erased it and added it). But where it states that there is still 200-300GB's left on each drive, does that make sense that it is asking for a 12th tape? Or is that correlated to the 'guestimation' on Retrospects part?

[Lennart_T]

And I kind of figured it was more of a guestimate, space wise, but it states that the tape is full at different intervals. (When I added each tape I went through, completely erased it and added it). But where it states that there is still 200-300GB's left on each drive, does that make sense that it is asking for a 12th tape? Or is that correlated to the 'guestimation' on Retrospects part?

I have only experience with LTO-3 tapes drives with the Windows version of Retrospect.

 

Tape capacity here is between 350GB to 700GB, usually around 550-600GB. If data isn't fed fast enough to the tape drive, you get blank blocks on the tape, not counting as "used" in terms of GB. Also, already compressed data can't be compressed more. For instance, .zip, .jpg, .pdf (usually), audio (usually) and video files are already compressed.

 

As Twickland points out: Retrospect requests a new tape only when the old tape is full (no more empty blocks) OR when a serious tape error prevents more data from being written to the tape. In the latter case, the log will clearly tell you it happened.

 

So, no, it is not correlated to any "guesstimate" at all.

[twickland]

I actually just tried that, to no avail. The Exabyte library is on a SCSI interface and we cannot necessarily restart as the computer is also our gateway.

By "restart" I meant restart the Retrospect engine, not reboot the computer.

 

If stopping and restarting the Retrospect engine did not fix the capacity error, this suggests a problem either with the media set's catalogue or with Retrospect's configuration file. The first is more likely, but the second is easier to test. To do so, quit the Retrospect console, stop the Retrospect engine, and drag the files Config80.dat and Config80.bak from /Library/Application Support/Retrospect to the desktop or other convenient location (so you can easily drag them back if these files turn out to be OK). Restart the engine and relaunch the console. You'll need to re-enter your license code. Go to Media Sets and point Retrospect to the location of the peculiar catalogue. If the capacity numbers are still wrong, the problem is with the catalogue file, which will need to be rebuilt.