Multiple recoveries on tape?

[Mike Smith_33]

Patrick is correct, there is only one on the tape. He is also correct in that I do like the answers that make me think I have a solution much better than the others.

Thanks all for you responses.

[Mike Smith_33]

There are not multiple recoveries on a tape.

[Bill Hassell]

Ignite/UX is NOT a general purpose backup program. It is designed to restore (and optionally reconfigure) a system or with a Golden image, deploy new systems. I would never assume that the processor ROMs will not rewind the tape (and there are hundreds of HP 9000 models, each with their own boot ROM firmware).

I can't tell you how many times someone has called me begging me to fix a multi-backup tape, whether tar, cpio, or even Ignite where an admin forgot to properly position the tape before appending. This can be due to bad documentation ("this tape has 4 archives on it" but actually had 7) or more common, using the AT&T rewind device where the driver positions the tape in rather bizarre ways (see: man 7 mt). I've had reports of losing 3 months' worth of backup data due to a simple tar overwriting the beginning of a tape.

The new super-tapes now hold hundreds of Gb (and cost a lot per tape) and makes it very tempting to store multiple images. But without a tape content manager (which is what Data Protector or Legato, etc will do) you are risking losing everything on the tape. And with Ignite/UX, the first image is a bootable file which may be able to boot from the middle of the tape on one machine but perhaps not on another. And all it takes is a simple change in Ignite code to add a rewind in the recovery code and now your multi-backup tapes are no longer useable for more than the first backup. For insurance purposes, I would call multiple backups per tape a high-risk policy.