reading files off a tape

[lawrenzo]

Hello

I used the below command to write files over 2gb to tape:

#dd if= bs=1024k | rsh "dd of=/target-file bs=1024k"

Is there any way of reading what files are on tape without extracting them to a file system?

Thanks

[Sundar_7]

Afraid, not. dd doesnt add any kind of headers neither it has any kind of index you can query from.

Only way to find out is to extract the file off the tape to a filesystem.

[Sundar_7]

But the good thing is like, you dont have to extract the entire file to find out the "FILE TYPE"

You can just extract less than 50 MB to figure out the FILE TYPE.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Lawrenzo,

I was about to post my response in the other thread and you already closed it :-).

dd will work fine if you are trying to copy a single file. However, if you have multiple files to be backed up on the remote tape, then you have few more choices

1. If both the source and the destination systems are HP systems, you can use fbackup without rsh

fbackup -f server:/dev/rmt/1m -i

2. If the source system is HP but the remote system is not, then you can still use fbackup

fbackup -f - -i |rsh "dd of=/dev/rmt/1m bs=1024k"

Look at the man page of fbackup for more information on -i and -g options.

3. If both the systems are not HP, then this thread doesn't belong here.. But you can still try gtar..

With fbackup, you can read files from archive

frecover -I /tmp/index -f /dev/rmt/1mn

/tmp/index contains the list of files backed up with fbackup.

-Sri

[lawrenzo]

Thanks Sundar

much appreiated.