fbackup

[Frances Prindle]

How do you make a copy of a fbackup tape?

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

if you have two drives you could do:

dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/dev/rmt/1m

where 0m would be the source drive and 1m would be the destination drive.

[Frances Prindle]

dd cannot be used with fbackup format

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

aghhh!!! sorry about that I should have read the message more closely... hmmm.. thats right, fbackup writes that special label/header to the tape.

DISCLAIMER - I am a bit rusty with my fbackup stuff, but just an idea - how about this... use frecover from the source and pipe it to fbackup on the second tape.

[Christian Aichmair]

Hi !
Duplicating a fbackup-Tape is not so easy, as tape-format depends on fbackup-Options (records, blocksperrecords, etc.).
The 1.st Record (I think) is always a 512 Bytes Header, then the Index-File, than follow a lot of EOF-separated Files.

I used "tcopy" (Public Domain) for copying fbackup-tapes about 6-7 years ago, I think it should work with the new fbackup-version tapes also.

Hope it helps,
schneck c/o Christian Aichmair

[Kevin Ernst]

More answers here (a duplicate of your original post, I guess):

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x01eea14d9abcd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Kevin Ernst]

(...and hopefully a workable solution)

[jherring]

making a copy of a fbackup tape is not easy and was not intended to be possible.

there are people who have succeeded however using combinations of different block sizes and the dd command.

I would not trust any fbackup tape that was copied as a viable DRP as I have seen it work and using the same commands it has failed the next time.

good luck

JOn

[Steffi Jones_1]

Hello,

The dd(1) command can be used to duplicate backup tapes created by most
standard HP-UX backup utilities.

Note: The examples shown here assume default command operation - if
variations are made when creating the backups (especially in the area of block
size, etc.), then these examples may need to be altered to work properly.


Duplicating tar(1) tapes

Copy contents of tar(1) tape to disk:
# dd if=/dev/rmt/ of=/tmp/tar.contents bs=10k

Copy disk file to new tape:
# dd if=/tmp/tar.contents of=/dev/rmt/ bs=10k

Verify new tape is readable by tar(1):
# tar -tvf /dev/rmt/


Duplicating cpio(1) tapes

Copy contents of cpio(1) tape to disk:
# dd if=/dev/rmt/ of=/tmp/cpio.contents bs=5k

Copy disk file to new tape:
# dd if=/tmp/cpio.contents of=/dev/rmt/ bs=5k

Verify new tape is readable by cpio(1):
# cpio -icvBt < /dev/rmt


Duplicating dump(1)/vxdump(1) tapes

Copy contents of dump(1)/vxdump(1) tape to disk:
# dd if=/dev/rmt/ if=/tmp/dump.contents bs=32k

Copy disk file to new tape:
# dd if=/tmp/dump.contents of=/dev/rmt/ bs=32k

Verify new tape is readable by restore(1)/vxrestore(1):
# restore tf /dev/rmt/, or
# vxrestore tf /dev/rmt/


fbackup(1M) (or SAM) tapes

Note: Unfortunately, fbackup(1M) (and SAM) creates backup volumes with a format that makes duplication of volumes by dd(1)
impossible.

See fbackup(1M) manpage for more information.

Steffi Jones