cpio tape recovery

[felix chathyoka]

i would like to restore atape which was backed up using cpio command but there is no docummentation of extensions used during the backup process. "cpio -ocvdBumt". how can i recover this tape?

[Joseph T. Wyckoff]

Many experts in the Omniback / Storage Data Protector forum may know the answer, but I am moving this question to the sys admin area, where I hope someone can help you faster.

Good Luck.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

First, you need to exemine the contents of the tape.

cpio -icvtB < /dev/tmt/2m (or whatever your tape device is).

This will list the contents of the tape and you can stop it at any point via Ctrl-C (assuming Ctrl-c is your intr key).

What I am mainly concerned about is that some dingaling backed this up with absolute paths (ie those that begin with "/") then you are going to have to restore to those locations exactly unless you choose to use pax rather than cpio. If the pathnames are relative (ie they begin with "./" or simply "somedir/somefile" then cd to the desired location and execute:
cpio -icvdumB < /dev/rmt/2m

[A. Clay Stephenson]

By the way, you can probably speed up the i/o if you reblock through dd. The 'B' cpio argument specifies 5K blocks so we can choose to read in multiple of 5K.

dd if=/dev/rmt/2m ibs=100k obs=5k | cpio -icvdumB