No of Times Tape has been used

[Rizwan Mohammed]

Hi Guys

Is there any way to find out how many times the tape has been used .

We are planning to change the tapes if they have been used for more than 50 times ..

checked up with frecover -V option doesnt give any output if the backup is taken in cpio or tar

Thanks

Rizwan

[RAC_1]

As the tape is overwritten with cpio and tar, it wont give you the details you want.

Same holds true for fbackup/frecover. Read man page of fbackup. It says "Since the information is on mdeia, this (-V) option will laways show 0"

With backups products like omniback and veritas netbackup, legat it is possible.

With tar/cpio/fbackup, only only option is when drive tells you that the tape is bad.

Or may be you can start doing it manully. Lable the tape, start putting records, when it is used.

Anil

[Rodney Hills]

As long as you only use fbackup on a tape, it does keep a usage count and can be gotten from the volume header (frecover -V).

If you wipe out the volume header with tar, cpio, etc then the count starts over with the next fbackup.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Rick Garland]

If you are using tar, cpio, fbackup interchangeably, you will need to manually keep track of the tapes use.

[Bill Hassell]

DDS tape drives keep logs in a reserved are on each tape. Unfortunately, the code to read these logs has always been experimental and not released. DLT and LTO tape drives may have similar logs but tape drives are fairly incompatible when it comes to accessing internal data. There is a tapeinfo tool (actually, tapeinfo is a wrapper for /usr/sbin/stm/uut/bin/tools/expert/get_tdev_info) but it requires a special license from HP to run it.

[R. Allan Hicks]

We do it by time.

With a regular tape rotation for daily backups. Each tape has a day of the week on it. We put the date that the tape entered service on the label. The Monday tape is used for the 52 Mondays in a year. Therefore at the end of the year, we know that the tape has been used 52 times and is discarded.

Not as elligant as legato telling you managing your media, but it works.

[Rizwan Mohammed]

Hi

I found out we can check the tape load count , i.e this will tell you how many times the tape has been loaded , but the problem is if the tape is inside and written many times it doent get the count.

#mstm,
Select SCSI tape
Go to TOOLS>Information and select Run.

Check for "tape load counter".

need to check if there is anyother option is availabe

[Bill Hassell]

That's all you're going to get (insertion count). The term "writing to a tape" is very broad. Is it writing one record, writing 3/4 of the tape, writing a record, backspacing 5 records, reading 2 records, skipping forward, etc. The STM tools will give you the insertion count which is the count I alluded to for tapeinfo above. If the tape drive supports this statistic then it will be accurate. BIG NOTE: you can insert the tape 100 times but nothing will be updated if the tape is write-protected. Note also that fbackup keeps the usage count in it's tape headers. If you write on the tape with cpio or tar, the header is destroyed and the next fbackup will re-start the count at 1,

I understand the need for a usage count but as you can see, an electronic solution won't fit the requirements.