Need to find the number of days a media is present in the tapelibrary

[Vidhya B]

Dear All,

How can I find the number of days a media is present in the tape library?

My backup server is running in HP-UX.

#uname -a
HP-UX bkpsvr B.11.23 U ia64 2564450715 unlimited-user license

Please help me this.

I am planning to write a script which wil tell me what are the tapes which are present more than 10 days in the tape library.
But I am not aware where will the information stored. Kindly help.

[Torsten.]

I don't think it is stored anywhere, unless your backup software stores this kind of information.

[hvhari]

I have not seen such information stored by library. May be you should check the options in your backup application or put this post in appropriate backup application forum.

[Curtis Ballard]

If you allow your script to keep history (maybe write output to a formatted file) then this could be done with the "mc" utility.

"mc -r IDSM" will report the inventory information of all element types in the library. Assuming your library is supported by mc and has a barcode reader then that output will also include the barcodes.

If the script runs periodically, parses the information, and updates some sort of file that contains information on tape/"age", then you could monitor the library.

A script monitoring the library will be close but won't ever be able to capture every possible tape export/import so if somebody takes out a tape and replaces it with one that looks identical you will only catch that if the script just happens to check the inventory while the tape is out of the library.

Can you comment on the goal? There are many other statistics that are tracked by some libraries. Most of the time tapes are managed either by load count or by full volume equivalents which are usage rather than age but frequently related.