TAR and FBACKUP on same tape?

[Damian Gardner]

I'm wonderring if one tape can be used for different TAR and FBACKUP sessions and still be readable for all data backed up to it? It seems like if an FBACKUP session is executed after a TAR session has already been saved on the tape, it renders the TAR session unreadable. Does anyone have any experience on this?

Thanks- Damian

[Steven E. Protter]

Yes but not at the same time.

Technically you can put anything you want on a tape. However if you actually want it to be useful for recovery you should not try and make up a tape that contains tar and fbackup.

Better to purchase a few more tapes than play around with this.

From what you have seen its obvious that fbackup is not designed to preserver the data thats already on the tape.

SEP

[melvyn burnard]

fbackup will always rewind the tape, and then write it's own headers on to the tape, thus overwriting any previous data.
You cannot use fbackup and any other backup command on to the same tape.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The only thing that can be put safely on a tape with fbackup is nothing else. Fbackup expect a rewind device so it's going to rewind to the beginning of the medium before doing anything else. If you did a number of mt fsf's after doing an fbackup, you might then be able to safely append a tar using a norewind device but I wouldn't do it.

There is really no reason to append a tar to an fbackup because fbackup will do anything tar will do unless you need portability. In that case, you shouldn't be using fbackup.

[Damian Gardner]

Thanks for your responses gentlemen. I think the obvious thing to do is convert my TAR scripts to FBACKUP.

Thanks very much.