DDS3 not backing up full amount

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Apr 10), Brandon Hagedorn said:
> Have a question about dds3 tape drives... I have a SONY SDT-9000 and
> when I use this command "tar c backup/ --totals" I get this message when
> the backup contains around 11.4 GB of files, here is the message 
> "Total Bytes written 10612029440 (9.9GB, 994Kb/s)   tar:/dev/sa0: Wrote
> only 0 of 10240 bytes     tar: error is not recoverable: exiting now"  
> 
> Was wondering why it's only going to 9.9 GB when the tapes are 12/24GB?
> I've tried 4 different (new) tapes and tried backing up 40GB of data (
> which I knew it wouldn't backup the whole thing). The same thing
> happens, stops at the 9.9GB point.

Try using a larger blocksize.  Tar defaults to 10k which is pretty
small.  Try 64k (the max FreeBSD can do):  "tar cb 128 backup/
--totals"

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com