frecover

[NALIN]

On doing an frecover on dds tape drive i get an error "active/unrecoverable onthis retry".

Since the file is there is it feasible that this can be forced to be recovered ? Is there a way to do it ?

[Thomas G. Tudrej]

here are some things to try:

kill all fbackup and frecover procs and try again.
clean the drive

it the file you are trying to recover appears on the index (frecover -I /tmp/indexfilename -d /devfile) that does not mean it made it to the tape but that it was scheduled to go on the tape. It could have been open during all fbackup tries.

[Nalin Uduwawala]

Does this message mean the file was open during the backup ?

If that was the case will there be a message to that effect during the fbackup process ?

If that was the case what would that message be ?

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

The message will be " file active/busy retry will continue on line nnnn"

[Andy Monks]

Your right, the file is physically on the tape. However, the file trailer (which fbackup put after the file) will have an flag saying it's invalid.

There is no frecover option that allows you to ignore this flag (of course, depending on the retry count, you could have multiple copies of the file too).

That said, while it's doing the frecover, the frecover command, doesn't know that the file is invalid, and therefore actually recovers the file. Assuming the file is large enough (so it takes long enough for you to try this), it wouldn't be impossible for you to write a program to open the temp file it's using and keep it open, waiting for you to press return. Then when frecover has finished the file and attempts to delete it, as you've got it open it won't delete there and then. At which point your program (having kept the file opened), can then copy the contents from it's original file (that will be deleted when your program ends) to another file.

Can't say I've tried this, but the theory is sound a least.