sam backup and viewing tape

[GraceO]

I just took over system administration of a server that has a SAM backup scheduled in CRON that is apparently rewinding and writing to the same tape. I say 'apparently' because the same tape has been in the drive and no one changes it! You'd think I would be getting errors as the tape is old and overused, but I cannot find any errors in SAM_br_msgs, or any of the SAM logs, or syslog.log. (The same directories are being backed up by other means, so the SAM backup is redundant. But, since I am new, I didn't want to just stop the SAM backup without figuring out what's actually happening.)

Is there a way to view what is currently on the tape? A date and time stamp of when it was last used? I've been going around in circles searching the forums and reading man pages.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

SAM uses the fbackup program and it is very easy to read the index and header:

To read the header (date/time of last backup)
frecover -V - -f /dev/rmt/0m

To read the table of contents:
frecover -I - -f /dev/rmt/0m

(specify the correct device file for the tape)

The default usage count is 100 times but this is just a recommendation. You can set the usage limit with the requisite (but probably overlooked by the previous sysadmin) config file. man fbackup for details.

Note that fbackup is by far the best (free) backup tool for HP-UX as it has an instant access index and useful header data. Like EVERY HP-UX system an Ignite/UX backup tape must be created on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. fbackup records in a method that allows recovery of any file on the tape within a couple of minutes.

[Patrick Wallek]

Sam uses fbackup to create the tape.

To see details of the tape or to get a file listing, you need to use frecover.

The frecover man page should provide sufficient information to get you started.

[GraceO]

Thanks to both of you. I guess I was afraid of using frestore for fear of accidentally restoring stuff from tape!