Getting only SAVESET Header Info

[Jack Trachtman]

Shriniketan,

The issue came up while we were reviewing our Disaster Recovery procedures.

Say we are at a DR site w/VMS booted from CD and a backup "recovery tape" from our site. The savesets on the tape used to be named with the disk labels, so mounting the tape and issuing a DIR would give us the disk names, the order (and the timestamps) of the files.

Since we switched our tape management system to ABS/MDMS, which requires that every Saveset have a unique name, now the saveset names don't give us much info.

Being able to get the Backup "header" record from each saveset would give us information needed for the restores. Using BACKUP/LIST on a full tape would take much, much longer than somehow pulling out just the header record.

With the info supplied by all (thanks very, very much to everyone), I've been able to create a software function that, for all savesets on a tape, lists only the header record, and ***doesn't take noticably longer than running a DIR cmd on the tape***.

Since the system disk is always the first file on our backup tapes, I just have to restore that file, boot that disk, and have access to my script, which I run to give me info to restore all the rest of the disks.

[Jack Trachtman]

Hein,

You were correct: changing DUMP/BLOCKS=END:1 *.* to DUMP/RECORDS=END:1 *.* allows me to dump just the 1st Backup block of every saveset on a tape. And dumping 1 record of every file on the tape doesn't take much longer than a DIR cmd on the tape!

Mounting the backup tape & PIPEing the output from the DUMP cmd to my script gives me what I need.

Thanks again to all

[Verne Britton]

Dear Jack,

any chance you will share the final version of your utility ??

Verne