Slow tape restore 1

[fmiller]

I'm restoring a couple of directories from a 24Gb DSS tape, and it's taking all day to read the tape.

It's an HP Shurestore 40 SCSI tape on an Adaptec 2940 controller on an OpenServer 5.0.2 Enterprise server. The server has 64Mb of RAM and is running at 200Mhz. I'm also using two Seagate hard drives and a CD-ROm on the same controller. It's restoring accounting data files, so some of them are pretty large (close to a gigabyte in a couple of the history files). It's taking over 12 hours to read the tape, which can't possibly be right. I'm spending days restoring two subdirectories, and I have another tape to go yet.

The command that I'm using to restore is cpio -icdv -C40960 -I/dev/rct0 "/u/*". It looks like it reads for a couple seconds then thinks about it for a while before reading the tape again. When I run tape amount it does show that amount of data being read off the drive is increasing, but boy is this ever slow. Is this normal?

 

[patw]

Sounds like a mismatch between the block size you wrote TO the tape as opposed to the block size you're trying to read from the tape.

Run down the backup script and use the same block size to read it.

- Then junk the script and get one of the 'Supertars' (Backup Edge or Lone-Tar) and enjoy bit level verified backups with one button emergency restores along with a user friendly front end for specific restores.

Also, 64MB is positively anemic on a server and 5.0.2 has been obsolete for years (5.0.6 is the latest, with 5.0.7 close to being released)