fbackup errors (not the same in the "search")

[Thi Vu]

Hello everyone,

I'm just starting the "fbackup" in place of our current "tar" to do the back-up. I'd read the man page for fbackup (>3X) and when I ran my script, I have these 2 errors that I can't find document anywhere. I went and search it through the forum but none for the type of error that I encounter. Any help would be greatly appreciate.

fbackup -f $tape -u0g $BUDIR/fullbkup -d $FULLOGFL -I $INDXFILE

These are the errors:
WARNING: unable to read a volume header
warnings encountered during backup: 4

I've read that "volume header" is general structure of fbackup - so it should be there right??

[Rodney Hills]

It is possible these were non-fbackup tapes you are reusing. fbackup looks for volume header info.

You shouldn't get them once fbackup has written on them.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

This is expected. If you have a virgin tape, or one that wasn't last used with 'fbackup', then you will see warning "unable to read a volume header". This will result in a returncode of <4> for the fbackup execution as documented in the man pages. In fact, the <4> is the value in the second line.

If you use the same tape again and again for 'fbackup', you will see that it keeps track of the number of times a tape is used. This is part of the header that 'fbackup' looks for on the tape.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Philip Chan_1]

Every tape being written by the fbackup program will have its own header information such as how many times such tape has been written for, so, if your tape is new for fbackup then you should see that warning, but next time the warning message should be gone.

~Philip