Re: [Bacula-users] Tapes not recycling: VolStatus = Error, all job are stalled

[Timo N. <tim...@te...>]

>> I successfully set the volume status to "Used" and then tried to prune 
>> the
>> offending volume. Bacula asked if I wanted to modify the retention 
>> period,
>> which is currently set to be 1 year. I chose yes and tried setting it to 
>> 1
>> day. Then I "list volumes" and the volume still has the same retention
>> period in the pool (1 year).
>>
> Not sure of that. In 5 years of using bacula with over 200 tapes in
> use I have never changed the retention period when I modifyied the
> volume status. However I would never use only 1 day retention.
>
>> Next I tried to purge the volume and Bacula reponds with:
>> "0 Files on Volume "June08-02" purged from catalog."
>> I should also mention that originally the volumes showing up as an error
>> were added to the pool using "add" rather than label.
>> Any other ideas or suggestions I can try?
>
> These were the correct suggestions so what happened?
>

I may have missed a point here, but this is how I see this:

The volumes were "add"ed to the pool but never "label"ed, if there is no 
autolabel enabled, the volumes do not actually exist yet anywhere but in the 
catalog?

Are they supposed to be tape or disk volumes? My guess is disk?

Then, when trying to write into nonexistent volume, without autolabel 
enabled, the volume status is set to "error". The purge procedure described 
above was formally correct, and it reports "0 files purged". What else could 
it do, if the volume (that doesn't even exist) was never written into, and 
thus had no files in it? Ok, maybe the volume status should have been 
changed, and in this special situation there may really exist a "feature" 
that could be considered as a bug (I guess I've run into this also 
sometimes, but never investigated it any more) of not changing the status. 
IMHO, after running the purge command, the volume status should get set to 
"purged" though there actually were nothing to purge. Or what do The Bacula 
Gurus say about it?

So, if I didn't miss something important, I would recommend updating the 
volume status to "append" and labeling the volume, and trying again. An not 
to forget reset the retention period to something more decent than the 
currenbt value of 1 day.

--
TiN