Thank you very much for the quick/great respsonses. ;-) The disk volume (required due to my lack of a second tape drive) introduces one more question... After I am done bcopying from the disk volume to the final duplicate tape volume, is it better to delete or disable the disk volume? I ask this since I would prefer my MediaIds to be contiguous.
Martin Simmons wrote: >>>>>> On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:22:20 -0400, Mike Seda said: >>>>>> >> All, >> I want to duplicate a tape volume to another tape volume. Since I only >> have one tape drive, I must copy the tape volume to a disk volume and >> then copy the disk volume to a duplicate tape. >> >> Question # 1 >> If I ever need to bscan in the duplicate tape, I want the volume name to >> be that of the original input tape volume. Will bcopy accomplish this >> for me, or will the resulting duplicate tape volume name be that of the >> disk volume? >> > > Neither -- bcopy never copies the volume label, so the label on the new tape > will remain. The label on the disk volume is irrelevant. > > > >> Question # 2 >> The one thing that I do not like about bcopy is that it wants you to >> actually create the duplicate volumes in the catalog even though there >> will be no job records associated with these volumes. Since, I find this >> unnecessary and confusing, I am tempted to just use dd to accomplish my >> tape duplication task. Since bacula reads files in 32K buffers, I came >> up with the following dd command: >> dd if=/dev/nst0 of=<volume_name>.img ibs=32k >> Will the aforementioned dd command provide me a good dd image that I can >> subsequently write to a duplicate tape? >> > > Maybe. A couple of things that will affect it: > > 1. The dd will stop at an eof marker on the tape. Bacula puts eof markers > between jobs and also every 1GB (by default). You'll probably need to run > dd several times to different img file until it reports end of tape and > then the same number of calls to dd to write the new tape. > > 2. The default block size is variable, not 32K, unless you override that in > the configuration. I don't think you can duplicate variable block sizes > with dd. > > __Martin > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users