9. Miscellaneous

9.1 I am getting errors such as st0: Error with sense data: extra data not valid Current error st09:00 and sense key Medium Error and Additional sense indicates Id crc or ecc error. This indicates that your tape drive requires the scsi2logical paramater set. See above.

9.2 I am getting lots of temporary files in the /tmp directory and taper is dying with FIFO errors in the log file.

If you are using libc5, try upgrading to glibc. If that is not possible, uncomment the "-DFIFO_PROBLEMS" define in Makefile.common.

9.3 I am using a SCSI drive and taper says my drive cannot seek, when I know it can.

Some SCSI drives require the block size set. If you are having the above problem, try setting the set blocksize preference ON.

9.4 In version 6.5, taper is not using preferences in my preference file

From 6.5, the names of the preference file, log files and info directories have been changed. Rename the following files/directories:

     .taper_log   ---> taper_log
     .taper_prefs ---> taper_prefs
     .taper_info  ---> taper_info

9.5 In version 6.5, taper can't find my info files

See above

9.6 How do I compress my info files which are currently uncompressed?

Just recreate the info files from the main menu

9.7 Why does looking for recursive links result in a seg fault?

The recursive link utility goes through your filesystem looking for links that are recursive (ie. end up pointing to themselves so that there is an infinite loop). This utility tries to find such recursive links. It finds them in one of two ways :

• It finds & tells you about the offending link
• It seg faults at the offending link

This way you can find & correct the offending link. Note recursive links are only a problem if you are backing up with hard links set to ON (ie. the file and not the link is backed up).

9.8 Why are the info files so big?

The new info file format from 6.8 is a sparse m-tree index. This is a very fast index file. However, because file names are 256 bytes under Linux, each file takes approximately 300 bytes of information and thus, the info files can grow quite big.

However, they do compress very well, so make sure that the compress info preference is ON. Also, if disk space is a problem, you can delete the files ending in `.1' and `.2' and reindex the files (from the utilities menu) when required.

9.9 My backup sets are no longer being recognized.

From 6.8.0a11, the format of the backup sets changed to accommodate the exclude option. To convert your old backup sets, simply insert line with the letter 'I' before each filename. For example, if your backup set looked like:

/home/yusuf/dir1

/usr/docs

/usr/local

the new backup set should look like:

I
/home/yusuf/dir1

I
/usr/docs

I
/usr/local