First off, thank you for creating this plugin, I have always wanted to have some tape archives at home and this seemed like a much easier way than passing through to a Debian VM and trying to transfer data that way.
However, I think I am doing everything completely wrong with LTFS.
Running Unraid 7.0.1
I am using brand new IBM branded LTO7 tapes in a (not new) IBM ULTRIUM-HH7 drive on firmware Q385 (my tapes were purchased from SHI so I at least feel good about them being legitimate)
When I insert a new tape, I run mkltfs -d /dev/sg23 to format the tape which appears to work just fine.
Next, I mount with ltfs -o devname=/dev/sg23 /mnt/ltfs -o eject -o umask=777
When I need to archive to tape I go to the top-level folder and run Tar cf - "folder name" | ( cd /mnt/ltfs; tar xfp - )
Initially this seemed to work, I could ls /mnt/ltfs and see the folders that copied, I assumed it was working and left it alone as my backups were running automatically on Monday mornings at 1AM.
I got an additional box of tapes and wanted to start to archive my media, mostly video and photos with some music. From what I understand all of those media formats are already compressed and I shouldn't expect any further compression on the tape, which is fine. I anticipated just using as close to 5TB as possible on the tapes just to keep some overhead and sanity.
I format the new tape and ran Tar cf - "folder name" "folder name" "folder name" "folder name" "folder name" | ( cd /mnt/ltfs; tar xfp - ). In this scenario my data added up to approximately 165GB. Towards the end of the files, I continued to get "No space left on device" messages.
My array has about 29TB of free space and the tape was just formatted. I thought I did something wrong so I formatted the tape again and tried again but the same issue persisted, it gets to almost the end of what I selected and kept giving "No space left on device" messages. I check tape logs by running sg_logs -a /dev/sg23 and assume that everything is copying to the index partition.
All files in the array are on 12TB 5400 RPM SAS disks. Tape is connected via a separate 6gb SAS controller and the tape drive is in an external enclosure, the tape drive was never part of a library.
Ok, fine, let me put my Monday backup tape back in and just see if that's OK. I put the Monday tape in, mount with the same command ltfs -o devname=/dev/sg23 /mnt/ltfs -o eject -o umask=777
Now if I try to copy files to the original Monday tape I get errors
I am sure the issue has to lie with me. I just want to throw files to tape, bring them to the bank vault and rotate them quarterly. If anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.
I will mention that this "Monday Tape" was originally formatted and SEEMINGLY working fine on Unraid 7.0.0 (although I never once ran a test restore of the data, only by checking ls /mnt/ltfs)