Can Fbackup generate tape number?

[Mel_12]

Hi All,

Is it possible for Fbackup to generate tape numbers for record keeping purposes? I am almost certain I once saw a tape ID printed in one of my logs upon inserting a brand new tape. Could somebody tell me how to use Fbackup to generate the internally stored tape number if possible.

Thanks
Mel

[Steven E. Protter]

I see nothing in the fbackup manual about this. Perhaps this information is already on the tape and is merely being reported.

SEP

[kamal_9]

Hi Mel
There is no such option in fbackup.if you having any backup utilities likes HP OMNI BACKUP then you can have that option

[Mel_12]

Actually, what I meant was volume id or number of some sort. How do we identify and label a tape besides using the day of the week? Could somebody share with me how they do it for record keeping. I don't have commercial backup software. Just relying on good ol fbackup to do the job.

Thanks
Mel

[Mark Ellzey]

Hi Mel,

Actually, fbackup writes a "Backup Identification Tag" on every fbackup performed. You can look at this by doing:

fcrecover -V

This tag is composed of the process ID and the start time of the PID. The start time appears to be the seconds since the EPOCH, although it's not specifically stated in the frecover man page.

I've looked at a few of my fbackup tapes and found that the process ID and the time is different on each one. It's unlikely that you would have the same PID of subsequent runs of fbackup, but not impossible. For that reason, you could use just the time stamp provided as a unique tape ID.

Regards,
Mark

[Mark Ellzey]

Oops, fcrecover = frecover

My bad.