reviewing old tapes

[cadencep45]

I have approx 5 years worth of a mix of incremental and full
backups on media dating from 4 years ago. The company moved buildings and changed backup media at that stage.

So I am looking to review what is there and determine a policy regarding what to keep and what to throw out.My initial suggestion is fairly drastic, ie

Incremental backups.

Throw out all incremental backups. If they are incremental, there should be a full backup which is more relevent at this stage. It simply is data, but not information at this remove.

Full backups.

Full backups are approximatley labelled with dates, so I can
order the backups in that basis.
What I would like to do is;

- Divide tapes into boxes.
- Label each box with a unique identifier.
- Provide a lookup from identifier to box contents, to allow me to recover a box from storage if required.

I can do this, but what I require in addition to this is
a listing of tape contents for each box. What I would like to do with this is to leave this online, with a link to the
tape/unique box number in order to restore this data if required.

Now noting that;

None of the tapes described above are in any legato index, as they were from an old legato server.

That the current legato server does not have a drive capable of reading this media. However I have setup a temporary legato server in order to verify I can read the media ( via scanner ).

Can anyone propose a method to somehow generate some sort of
relevent index of content ? A simple list of savesets with date information would be useful.

Thanks.

 

[605]

You should use "scanner -m" to return the information about volumes and save sets.

Then just use mminfo to find all full save sets and agther the info like:

mminfo -q "level=full" -r "client, name, savetime, sumflags, ssid" -ot

This will sort the save sets by the time which is a good identifier. Good luck.

 

[Chapter11]

Start with the most "recent" tape in that collection of media, and scan for the bootstrap record. Do an mmrecov using that, and that should restore the media index for your media.

 

[cadencep45]

Thanks for the responces.

605,

when you say run scanner, are you assuming that I run this
for every tape ? As there are approx 500 tapes, I hope not ?

I like the mminfo query however, that makes alot of sense.

Can I run this is conjunction with the sugestion from Chapter 11, ie to recover a bootstrap and run the mminfo query which will provide details the the period the bootstrap covers ? I guess doing this selectively over the tapes will create a reasonable index of savesets ?

 

[605]

Yes, if you do not have any idea about the save sets, you do not have any other choice.

If you know about your latests tapes, you can rebuild a compatible system with the same name & same directories and recover
the bootstrap. This would recover the media db. Then correct
the configuration, especially the hardware. This is the faster way but it requires that you have some knowledge about the old system.