Reading info from DLT tape

[Timothy Czarnik]

Hey everyone!

I am looking for information on how to tell how data was written to a tape. Confused? Same here... here's the info:

A friend is having problems restoring an Oracle database. It seems that they do Oracle exports (?) directly to a DLT drive. Does anyone have any idea how Oracle exports to a tape drive? Any idea on how I can get this data from the tape to a filesystem (dd command?). Any general things I can try? Sorry, but I can't even tell you what version of Oracle it is at this point (still trying to find that out from him).

Thanks in advance!
-Tim

P.S. I know this isn't a lot of info to go on, but I've found that the best sleuths in the world read these forums! :)

[John Palmer]

Hi,

Try using Oracle's import tool to read the tape. It will soon complain if it's not an export tape.

imp show=y full=y file=/dev/rmt/??

Regards,
John

[Ken Scharpell]

Sounds like Oracles hotbackup program, RMAN (old version EBU), which backs up on the fly then directly writes it to tape. You will need to use RMAN utils to read the tape back if needed.

[Timothy Czarnik]

John and Ken,

Thanks for the quick reply! Is there a way via Oracle/command line to get a listing of what is on this tape without actually having it try to import data from the tape? Forgive me, I am not an Oracle guy!

Thanks again!
-Tim

[Ken Scharpell]

Oracles hotbackup program should write to a logfile when it runs. Does it run from cron ? is there a logfile you can find showing when it ran and if it was successful ?

Actually, Oracles hotbackup program can use a number of standard HPUX backup commands to write to the tape so use them to see if you can read it back. Try tar tvf, frecover -I, or cpio to see if you can see whats on the tape.

[John Palmer]

Hi,

imp with show=y doesn't actually do any importing it just lists the sql commands that would be run.

Regards,
John