Operating System - HP-UX
1830648 Members
3111 Online
110015 Solutions
New Discussion

virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

 
Bob Brown_1
Frequent Advisor

virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

Is there any built-in (or freeware) way to direct a process that is expecting to write to tape on hpux to instead go to a disk file? I'm not looking for a full virtual tape solution, just something for a database reorg process (writes the tape and then reads it back in).
(file will be >2GB in size).

thanks.
-Bob
4 REPLIES 4
Peter Godron
Honored Contributor

Re: virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

Bob,
you can use fbackup and frestore to a file, with the -f option.

See man frecover
option -f

fbackup -i /usr -f - | (cd /mnt; frecover -Xrf -)

just replace the - after -f with a file.
Best testing it on your own system first!
Bob Brown_1
Frequent Advisor

Re: virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

I'm not looking to run fbackup...its an interbase reorg process that is expecting to write to a tape and then read it back in...any ideas on whether other processes like this one can be tricked into writing to disk instead of tape?

thanks.

-Bob
Ivan Ferreira
Honored Contributor

Re: virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

Maybe you can use a fifo file. For example, in this case, I will use a fifo to generate an "on the fly" compressed tar file:

cd /dev/rmt
mkfifo 0m
gzip < 0m > /opt/backup.tar.gz &
tar cvf /dev/rmt/0m /etc
Por que hacerlo dificil si es posible hacerlo facil? - Why do it the hard way, when you can do it the easy way?
Peter Godron
Honored Contributor

Re: virtual tape? (anyway to do this for free)?

Bob,
how does the system currently work i.e. how do you specify the tapedrive it is going to right to?
Have you tried specifying a non-existent file in /dev/rmt ?