Can fbackup tapes be read by another means

[Paul Gold]

I have a selection of fbackup created tapes
1 weekly full and 6 incremental, in 4 cycles

Having just tried to frecover with -N option I am recieving the error

bad header, not an fbackup tape

tried to salvage voluem but have been unable to read any of them except one which worked fine but was incremental and didnt have data needed

is there another tool to read an fbackup volume or a way to force read from the tape?

Paul Gold
CAST systems

[John Palmer]

Paul,

Only frecover will be able to restore data from the tapes sensibly but you can use dd to look at the data.

An fbackup tape has from memory, an initial file which contains the volume information followed by the backup set.

Try reading the volume information with:-

export TAPE=/dev/rmt/
mt rew
dd if=$TAPE bs=512

[Andy Monks]

Just apart from the index at the front, the header and trailer to each file, you'll also have to contend with fast search marks on the tape. This makes even dd'ing all of it rather hard. If you've turned off fast search marks, they it would be possible to write a program to read the tape and then make some sense of it.

Btw, fbackup/frecover use a wonderful little I/O librariy written just for it which addresses the fast search mark stuff and other bits.

[Trevor Dyson]

Hi Paul,

Check out the following previous post:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x0b68c5ea0230d411ade80090279cd0f9,00.html

The fanalyze tool may help.

Good luck - Trevor