Hiyas. Last night I was testing one of our shell script (not made by me) that is having some problems. What it does is that it backups some oracle data to tape and it is failing. I put the commands manually that it uses inside it to make the backup, in order to debug where it was failing. I ran the commands and it returned back, after like 12 hours, with the below error:

cpio: write : I/O error
cpio: A write error has occurred.

cpio -ov -O/dev/ntape/tape0

Ok. Apparently, the tar finished. But listing the tape contents only gives me three files, whereas they are more than 30.

# tar tvf /dev/tape/tape0
blocksize = 256
-rw-r--r--   202/0      977 Mar  3 06:37:57 2006 01032006Tarjeta.dat.Z
-rw-r--r--   202/0     7088 Mar  2 05:48:20 2006 01032006aamcc.dat.Z
-rw-r--r--   202/0     9393 Mar  2 02:02:55 2006 01032006aamcg.dat.Z
#

The error message is pretty self descriptive. The kernel tried to write data to tape and the tape driver returned an error. If this used to work ok, it is probably a hardware problem most likely with whatever tape drive you are using. Your tape driver may have logged a message using whatever facility is available on whatever OS you are using. Depending on which model of what family tape drive you have, there may be some operator maintenance that could be tried such as cleaning the transport and/or read/write heads. Also the medium on which you were writing may be bad and you may be able to try another instance of that medium. That's about all I can do with this error report. Oh well, at least you let "tape" slip out. That's more detail than we usually get.

Thanks Perderabo. I forgot to include my unix version, sorry for that. It is HP Tru-64 v.5.1b. The media we are using is HP's DDS4, I believe it is 40GB compressed and 20gb uncompressed.

What can you say about the last part with tar ? what I did was this

tar cvf dev/tape/tape0 *032006*

At first you had a slash in front of the dev. Now you don't. Which is it really? It makes a big difference. You are doing a v in cvf so it should display the filenames. Are there 30 there...and then only 3 with tvf? Or 3 both times? If 30 during the cvf and 3 during the tvf, which 3??? The first 3? The last 3? 3 random selections? Did you rewind the tape bewteen the cvf and the tvf? If so how? Did you try a cleaning tape?

That was a typo, it is /dev/tape/tape0. When I list the tape contents, it always returns the first 3 files that it tar'ed when using cvf. Please, see the attached file, so you can actually see the oputput. It doesn't seem normal to me.

Attached Files

backup_output.txt (27.3 KB, 17 views)