Hey folks. I've got a pretty big tape setup with 2 autoloaders and a couple of standalone drives. I'm using Bacula primarily; I have a 17TB backup of my Plex/TA library pending. However, Bacula keeps deciding that the tape is full long, long before then - sometimes after a few hundred MB written. So I've been working through the tapes I used for that backup and running an mt erase on them to try to get Bacula to realise these tapes have 2.5TB of usable space.
However, while most of them take hours to erase (indicating a full pass of the whole tape), a few are done in minutes or even seconds, even with a second pass. I suspect there's some correlation between this and Bacula not using the whole tape. Does anyone know what this means and if the tapes are actually usable? Or does this indicate damaged tapes?