Re: deleting a failing tape

Hi Alan,

Am 03.02.2026 um 18:18 schrieb Alan Polinsky:
> My monthly backup has recently run and one of the tapes used in the 
> backup is obviously failing. Is there a proper way to eliminate that 
> tape from the pool so it can be replaced?

Sure. And of course it dead simple, provided you already know everything :-)

> I am on Bacula 9.6.7.

Erm... would you think a reminder to updata is in order? ;-)

> This 
> time I am trying to rely only on Bacula scripts rather than going 
> directly to the database and deleting the tape.

You can actually delete volumes from the catalog and the deletion should 
also be done on all related entries, but I think this is rather 
aggressive to handle the situation. I'd do the following:

1. mark the tape so it will not be used again to write data to: 
Read-Only would be a good choice.

2. only if you want to make sure Bacula will never rely on data that is 
on this tape, i.e. if you want to also invalidate all jobs that have 
data on the tape in question, you should purge the volume.
Personally, I wouldn't, assuming that even a failing tape may be better 
to restore from than no backup at all. But see next item.

3. if you would prefer to re-run some or any jobs that have data on the 
tape in question, check which ones that are.
There's a prepared query for this purpose in the query sample file, and 
I suspect most GUIs can do this, too.
Of course you'd then run the jobs.

4. I would actually not remove the tape from the catalog (its records 
are part of your logging / audit trail IMO) as long as anything in the 
catalog still refers to it. In other words, just keep it there, keep it 
in status Read-Only, eventually it will be pruned of jobs.

5. if you really want to delete the volume information from the catalog, 
the purge volume= bconsole command would ensure that all related 
information is also properly cleaned up. As stated above, I'd not do 
that without particular reasons.

At this point, Bacula would never refer to any data on that volume, and 
no job would have it in its list of media, so this is the time to 
actually destroy the tape physically, and optionally delete the volume 
from the catalog.

6. Thus: delete volume= is the bconsole command.

Note that I do not imply anything about unloading the tape from the 
library; I guess you know how to do so and in particular how to update 
Bacula's idea of the library's inventory.


Does that help?

Cheers,

Arno

> 
> Thank you.
> 
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Arno Lehmann

IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück



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