make a label for a tape

[Ho_5]

Hi all,

Is it possible to make a title label on the Ignite-UX tape?? I mean without to untar the tape, using some Unix command to see what is title of the tape.
So I need the command to make and te read.

Thanks

John

[John Poff]

Hi John,

One way to do it might be to use the -t option in the make_tape_recovery command. This option specifies a tape label [from the man page]:

-t tape_title_string
Specifies a custom message that will be displayed to the
user during a recovery from the tape. This may be useful to
help identify the tape. The default title that will be
written to the tape is of the form: "Recovery tape created from system: on "

Other than that, I'd suggest just putting a label on the tape when it is created.

JP

[Steven E. Protter]

All you need to do is use make_tape_recovery to make the Ignite tape.

Any kind of labeling if any is done by Ignite. You don't want to mess with an Ignite tape after its made, all you want to do is click on the write protection so its there when you need it.

SEP

[Ho_5]

Sorry, I made a mistake.
I am not using Ignite-UX software.
Every week a tar backup will be put on the tape. We use 52 tapes per year, every week we have to change the tape. The tape is not changed by us, so we want to verify that the correct week number tape is located in the tapestreamer.
I want to put a header/label on the tape, so we can remote watch or the correct tape is put in the tapestreamer.
So my question is, how to put a permanent header/label in the tape and how to read it.

Regards,

John

[John Poff]

Hi,

Interesting problem. Here is something I thought of that you could try. What you could do is to touch a file with the current date, then use tar to archive just the date file, with the no-rewind tape device. Then, use the mt command to forward space the tape [fsf], and then do your regular tar job.

When you get that tape back in the tape drive, you should be able to do a tar tv on it and just see the date file listed. If that is the tape you need, do the mt fsf and tar off the files.

JP

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi John:

Instead of using 'tar', use 'fbackup'.

With 'fbackup' writes a volume label which can be examined/extracted by 'frecover'. More importantly, 'fbackup' allows the specification of "graph" files containing inclusion and exclusion files and directories. Files which are changing during the backup process will be recopied until they are either found to be static or a maximum number of retries at copying have been exhausted. Recovering a file from a tape made with 'fbackup' is done with 'frecover' which has the ability to *rapidly* search the tape and extract the file, files and/or directories you specify (once again, via the commandline or via graph files).

Have a look at the man pages (1M) for both 'fbackup' and 'frecover'. While these are HP-UX proprietary utilities (i.e. not portable), they are far superior to 'tar' and 'cpio'.

Regards!

...JRF...