Re: deleting a failing tape

Arno and list folks:


Thanks a lot. I'll follow your suggestions. My initial fears are 
validated by your comments. The LTO3 tape successfully backed up 300 
gigs before hitting the bad section of tape. I had hoped that a 
retentioning of the using mt -f /dev/nst0 retention would help, but it 
did nothing.  I'll use the query to find out what's been saved on the 
tape and go from there.


Alan

On 2/3/26 12:48, Arno Lehmann via Bacula-users wrote:
> 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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>


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