first write date of dds tape

[Lalo_Weng]

Hi, All masters,

I have many DDS tapes recording our data backup from 3 years ago. Now I want to know in which date I wrote the data into the tape. Can we find this from the tape? I believe that there must some fields on the tape holding this information just as file feature. But how can we retrieve out?

Thanks in advance.

[steven Burgess_2]

Hello

You can get the volume header if the tapes are fbackup volumes

frecover -V `tty`

Regards

Steve

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi again

You can also generate an index

frecover -I /tmp/tapeindex

If you wish to know wether all the data is on the tape -

Check the index - get the last file backedup and attempt to restore that file, if the file restores ( to /tmp for eg )

cd /tmp

frecover -xXv -f /dev/rmt/ -i

You more than likely have a full tape as per index

Regards

Steve

[John Palmer]

It depends on what backup program you used. There's no additional 'system' data written to a tape, only what's written by the backup program itself.

If it's an fbackup tape then you can get details that include when the tape was written by using frecover with the -V flag.

If not fbackup, let us know what format the tapes are...

Regards,
John

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

You can also do a tar and check if the tapes were written in tar format.

tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m

If so then it would list the contents and then you can do a tax -xvf to retrieve the files if required.

If done thro cpio then do to list contents

cpio -ictvm -I /dev/rmt/0m

HTH,

Piyush

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Lalo,

If the data was backed up using fbackup. you can get this info on when the backup was made using frecover. If the data was backed up using tar/cpio, it is not possible until you restore the data and check for the data of some log file.

Hope this helps.

Regds