This seems like an obvious question, and yet I'm stumped figuring out
how to do it.
I am backing up four machines onto vtapes that I burn to DVD. Because
the vast majority of my data being backed up never changes, this is
almost effectively an archival setup (but not quite, and I'm not
currently willing to set up different configs for the archival vs. non-
archival, my setup works nicely for me).
My runspercycle is fairly high since I don't mind accumulating
incrementals over a fairly long period due to how little actual change
occurs on a daily basis.
Naturally, as disks are promoted to balance out the load and as normal
timing comes around to run full backups, I end up with a number of
vtapes that are no longer active. Looking at my tapelist, I see that
all of the vtapes are currently listed as reuse and that there's no
indication that tape 1 (for instance) is no longer "active" since the
most recent full backup has effectively rendered it "inactive".
What I'd like to be able to do is have an automated way to tell which
vtapes have been superseded meaning that all of the backup images have
more recent images at that or lower level on a later tape.
Is there an automated way to do this currently? I'm sure that I can
devise a way to go through the index files are build a model of the
current tape contents and note which ones are no longer active, but it
feels like something that ought to have been done already. Has it?
Thanks,
Bruce.
- How can I find what tapes are actually active? Bruce Thompson
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