Single drive manual rotation – PBS always demands a specific tape

gustini

New Member
Feb 3, 2025
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Hi there,

With a single drive and staff manually inserting tapes each morning, PBS pre-selects a next-media-label and strictly demands that exact tape, even with --force-media-set and allocation policy Always:

Code:
allocated new writable media 'LTO6-Montag1'
Checking for media 'LTO6-Montag1' in drive 'LTO6'
wrong media label LTO6-Dienstag1 (uuid...)
Please insert media 'LTO6-Montag1' into drive 'LTO6'

The staff inserts whichever tape is scheduled for that day – they cannot predict or control which tape PBS will select from the pool in advance.

Workaround we implemented: We read proxmox-tape backup-job list --output-format json every 5 minutes and display the next-media-label prominently in a custom web dashboard, so staff knows which tape to insert. This works, but feels like it should be unnecessary.

Feature request / question: Is there a way to tell PBS "use whatever tape is currently in the drive" without pre-allocating? Something like a --use-current-media flag would be very helpful for single-drive manual rotation scenarios.

Environment:

PBS: HPE ML350 Gen10
Drive: HP Ultrium 6-SCSI (/dev/st0), no changer
Pool allocation: Always
Retention: 12h
Use case: daily offsite rotation, staff swaps tape each morning

Both issues make proxmox-tape backup with --groups filtering on a changer-less drive essentially unusable from the CLI. Happy to provide logs or test patches.

PBS Version:
proxmox-backup 4.2.0 running kernel: 7.0.0-3-pve
proxmox-backup-server 4.2.0-1 running version: 4.2.0
proxmox-kernel-helper 9.0.4
proxmox-kernel-7.0 7.0.0-3
proxmox-kernel-7.0.0-3-pve-signed 7.0.0-3
ifupdown2 3.3.0-1+pmx12
libjs-extjs 7.0.0-5
proxmox-backup-docs 4.2.0-1
proxmox-backup-client 4.2.0-1
proxmox-mail-forward 1.0.3
proxmox-mini-journalreader 1.6
proxmox-offline-mirror-helper 0.7.3
proxmox-widget-toolkit 5.1.9
pve-xtermjs 5.5.0-3
smartmontools 7.4-pve1
zfsutils-linux 2.4.1-pve1


Best regards

Matthias