No space left on device

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This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

The Amanda report shows

 FAILURE SUMMARY:
    backupclient /diskname lev 0: partial taper:  No space left on device

even though the tape is known to be of greater capacity than the amount of data written to it.

Parsing taper debug logs may show something like

 1239648308.496438: taper: warning: Got EIO on /dev/nst5, assuming end of tape
 1239648308.496873: taper: Device /dev/nst5 error = 'No space left on device'
 1239648308.497001: taper: Device /dev/nst5 setting status flag(s): DEVICE_STATUS_VOLUME_ERROR
 1239648308.497367: taper: device /dev/nst5 ran out of space

Explanation

The tape drive head may be dirty and causing things to appear as though the end of tape has been reached.

Solution

Run a cleaning tape in the tape drive.

If this is a new config and tape size has not clearly been established, possibly the length of the tape specified in the tapetype definition is too large.