[Techtalk] Detect if Dump used multiple tapes for backup.

Conor Daly conor.daly-linuxchix at cod.homelinux.org
Tue Jun 22 10:02:09 UTC 2010


I'm backing up a 300Gb filesystem to an SDLT320 tape and, occasionally,
the weekly level 0 dump will overflow to a second tape.

The same tape is used for a daily level 1 backup using:

mt -f /dev/nst0 eod

to wind to the end of data first.

I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to detect from the first tape if
the backup overflowed to a second tape so that I can load the second tape
before doing the 'mt eod' bit.  Obviously I cannot ask the dump at the
start of the tape if it overflowed as it will not know at that point.

The tapes are re-used on a 3-monthly basis so it is always possible that the
second tape may have a partial dump already on it so I cannot directly ask
that.

If I do a

mt -f /dev/nst0 eod

followed by a

mt -f /dev/nst0 status

I get flags:

 EOF EOD ONLINE IM_REP_EN

both in the case of a full tape and in the case of a part-full tape.

Any thoughts?

Conor


-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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