[Bug-tar] memory exhausted

[Dr. Jürgen Vollmer]

Hi,

I currently use tar 1.20 under a SuSE 11.0 / 32 bit Linux system to do a tape 
backup to HP DDS4 tape drive with a 6 slot autoloader device.
It worked well for severeal years.

Not I'm not able to display (list) the tape contants, since tar aborts with 
the message:

        /usr/local/bin/tar: memory exhausted
        /usr/local/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

The system has 500MB RAM and 3GB of swap space.

this happes somewhere reading the 3rd of the 6 tapes. 
I have written and read the tape using various blocking factors.
Writing the backup is ok, listing fails.

I use the following command line

    /usr/local/bin/tar --multi-volume --blocking-factor=20 \
     --format=posix --totals 
     --file=/dev/st0 --new-volume-script '/backup/bin/tar-it -N -v' --list

The script 
        /backup/bin/tar-it -N -v
loads the next tape into tape drive. It works well.

As a note: the files to be backuped are contains a huge amount of hard links, 
since one "snapshot"  created by the rsnapshot-tool 
(http://www.rsnapshot.org) is to backuped. (This worked well for a long 
time).
The backup consists of approx. 140GB.

Any help is apreciated, since I currently have no valid backup!

With best regards.

Jürgen Vollmer

-- 
Dr.rer.nat. Juergen Vollmer, Viktoriastrasse 15, D-76133 Karlsruhe
Tel: +49(721) 92 04 87 1 Fax: +49(721) 92 04 87 2
address@hidden
www.informatik-vollmer.de
Internet-Telefonie: www.skype.com Benutzer: juergen.vollmer
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