frecover - I ---- did fbackup fail?

[Jon Mattatall]

Ok -
fbackup was performed on two dds2 tapes -
when I try to frecover -I (eye) to a file, I get the following

frecover(2105): did not find expected file marker
frecover(5419): checksum on volume header is incorrect.
frecover(5420): not an fbackup volume; magic value is incorrect
frecover(2105): did not find expected file marker
frecover(5412): Do you wish to try to salvage this volume? (^[yY]/^[nN]) y
frecover(5413): attempting to read backup following bad volume header

Is this just a failed backup (do it again?)

Jon

[Sachin Patel]

Hi Jon,
Most probable it is bad backup or bad tape. Try rewinding tape
#mt -t /dev/.... rew
#fbackup -f /dev/... -V -

Sachin

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Most likely, the backup (if it actually occurred) has been overlaid by some other program, perhaps tar or cpio.

It's important to script backup tasks so that you can eject the tape immediately after it is done. To eject the tape, use:

/usr/bin/mt -t /dev/rmt/whatever offline

Also, make sure you write the results of the backup to a file so you can see the results. Do this by adding the -v option and then at the end of the fbackup options, redirect stdout and stderr into a file, soemthing like this:

fbackup ...options... > /var/tmp/fbstatus 2>&1

The file /var/tmp/fbstatus has all the normal as well as error messages. Here's an example of using all the options where the $env variables are set elsewhere in the script:

/usr/bin/fbackup
-u -v -V $VOLUMELOG -f $TAPEDRIVE -${BACKUPLEVEL} -I $INDEXFILE -d $DATESFILE -g $GRAPHFILE -c $PARAMFILE > $STATUSLOG 2>&1
/usr/bin/mt -t $TAPEDRIVE offline

Always specify a parameter file to override the old style tape values as the defaults are inefficient for DLTs and DDS drives.