On 10/5/26 3:18 PM, Lloyd Brown via Bacula-users wrote:
Hey, all.I've run Bacula off and on for several years, including v5 and v9, both using disk for the backup media. I'm setting up my first instance using tape, and Bacula 15. I keep intermittently running into I/O errors on the tape, which seems to cause Bacula to declare the tape as "Full", even if it's only used 10s of MB of a 30TB tape. Are there any general recommendations for setup that I might have missed? Some kind of retry mechanism? Some kind of tuning? I've already replaced SAS cables, and it doesn't seem to make any real difference. In this case, I'm running one RHEL 9.6 host, attached via SAS to 2 LTO-10 drives, in a Spectra Stack tape library. Using the stock Linux tape drivers, not the IBM ITDT specialty driver. The other tenant in the library (Versity) has not had issues even remotely resembling these. I'm attaching an excerpt from the bacula log when the I/O errors occurred. I'm still trying to find system logs from around the same time. Any recommendations or pointers welcome. Thanks,
Hello LloydI have been working in Quantum's lab near Denver (remotely) to certify Bacula Enterprise with their LTO9 and LTO10 drives in their tape libraries.
I was experiencing these same I/O errors and it turned out the tape drives were faulty. Once they were replaced, these issues went away. It could also be faulty tapes in your case, but in my case it was the drives. It could also be that the drive(s) need cleaning.
Regarding "the other tenant (Versity)" not having these issues, I am guessing that these two systems share the robot arm, but not the drives, so if the drives zoned to Bacula were zoned to Versity I am sure you would see the same issues reported by that software.
Tape drive I/O errors reported by Bacula are exactly that - tape drive I/O errors - and not a Bacula issue. It is is Bacula reporting what the drive is telling the SD.
Also, it will not solve your problem, but you might want to consider upgrading your Bacula installation since version 9.6 is quite old. Version 17.0.0(beta) is the latest Community version available.
P.S. On a somewhat related note, you might be interested in my mtx-changer drop-in replacement script, and my tape-alert drop-in replacement script. Both do much better logging and have additional features (like automatic drive cleaning, and email reporting of tape alert issues) which make them quite useful in a Bacula (Community or Enterprise) environment. Plus it would benefit my open-source software to get some more real-world experience/feedback. :)
Check out mtx-changer-python, bacula-tapealert, and baculabackupreport @ my Github account here: https://github.com/waa I'd love to hear some feedback if you decide to give them a try! Hope this helps, Bill -- Bill Arlofski [email protected]
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