How to duplicate a tape and what if the tape was problematic?

[gwichman]

Arcserve 2000 SP4. How would one go about duplicating a tape so I would have 2 copies of it? I seem to recall reading some cmdline tool that does it..

More importantly, what if the tape in question has issues?

Perhaps it's a tape thats part of a sequence and i dont have the other tapes..

Perhaps it fails to merge or restore due to some corruption..

Would the copy succeed or fail in such a case? Would i still be able to make a duplicate of a corrupted/problem tape?

Thanks!

 

[ACiDelic]

I think ARCserve 9 comes with a tapecopy utility that lets you copy a tape, but I'm not sure if that comes with ARCserve 2000.

Restoring the data on that tape will be difficult/impossible unless it is the first in the sequence. If the tape is number 2 or 3 in the sequence I don't think you can merge it in or restore its data, because ARCserve will always ask for sequence 1.

 

[gwichman]

thanks.. i believe there is indeed a tapecopy utility. As for merging a sequence 2 or 3, you can in fact do that just fine. It depends on the sessions on your sequences though. If the 1st tape in the sequence has session 1 and 2, and the beginning of session 3 - the 2nd tape will have the end of session 3.. so it'll be impossible to merge session 3 without both tapes.. if session 3 is the only session on the 2nd tape, then yes you can't merge the 2nd sequence at all. If however there is a 4th, 5th, etc session on tape #2, you can merge the tape and at least those sessions.

In other words you can merge any complete sessions on the tape in question.

 

[Cyklops]

You can also merge without using the *cat files by using DonotUseCatalogMerge utility ( see :

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/16126.html

)
OR you can scan the tape using the scan utility and then restore by session with the 'restore by backup media' option and an include filter. This will only restore the file(s) that are in the filter.

regards