Copying an LTO tape

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Hi all,

I did a search here for copying a backup tape to another. I found we can use:

dd if=/dev/rmt/2m of=/dev/rmt/3m bs=512k

but this didn't work.

I also tried:

dd if=/dev/rmt/2m bs=512 | dd of/dev/rmt/3m bs=512

but this didn't work either. I seem to need to put the right block size.

First of all, the original tape is written by SAP BRBACKUP with bs=16k. I need this tape to be stored offsite, and to have a copy of that tape (by dd for example) to stay onsite without running the long online backup again. From init.sap I have:
tape_copy_cmd cpio
cpio_flags -ovB
cpio_in_flags -iuvB
dd_flags obs=16k bs=16k
dd_in_flags ibs=16k bs=16k
tape_size 200000.000 MB (200 GB)

What do you suggest?

[Hemanth Gurunath Basrur]

Hi Khalid,

Check if these document are of some help.

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/otsearch/getfile?id=/hpux/onlinedocs/netsys/omni/chapt-2.fb.html&searchterms=BRBACKUP%7cSAP&queryid=20030928-092828

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/otsearch/getfile?id=/hpux/onlinedocs/netsys/omni/chapt-5.fb.html&searchterms=BRBACKUP%7cSAP&queryid=20030928-092828

Regards,
Hemanth

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
I don't know much about BRBACKUP but it is not always possible to use dd with medias written by backup tools. There may be seek marks and such on the tape that dd don't know anything about.
Do you use any backup tool (as Data Protector or Legato Networker) ? If so there is perhaps a copy feature included (it is in Data Protector) that will do the job for you.

Or is there any copy utility in BRBACKUP ?

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Hi,

Leif: we had that in mind. We isr OmniBackII 3.5 but it will not be used here. Our new SAP project is going to Tivoli on IBM machines. I was looking for a way to do it wihout software. Also, at this moment OmniBack failed to recognize the LTO drives??!!