Tape drive Documentation... Possible bug in the tape UI?

[adamboutcher]

I'm going to step this into a few questions so it'll be a longer post but I'm confused and the documentation isn't as complete as I'd expect (unlike PVE). I think I may have a bug but I'm not entirely sure.

In the tape drive section, what does the "Drive Number" relate to?

 

[dcsapak]

see the docs here:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/tape-backup.html#tape-drives

The `--changer-drivenum` is only necessary if the tape library includes more than one drive (the changer status command lists all drive numbers).

e.g. if you have a changer with 4 drives, we need to uniquely identify the drives inside, and we do that by the numbering the changer gives the drive

theoretically we could try to identify them by their serial number, but in practice many changer don't return the serial information for the drive when talking to the changer itself...

 

[adamboutcher]

Thanks! So this is great in the documentation but the text isn't searchable with the labels from the UI.

A word of warning to future users, you need to know which drive address matches the drive number in the changer. Getting them mixed up can do strange things...

 

[dcsapak]

Thanks! So this is great in the documentation but the text isn't searchable with the labels from the UI.

true, this is definitely improvable

A word of warning to future users, you need to know which drive address matches the drive number in the changer. Getting them mixed up can do strange things...

also true. It's on my todo list for a while now to improve this situation, but I did not have enough time yet to think about possible solutions