Tapedrive inventory 1

[deeway]

hi,
How can i see what's on a tape?

Thanx

 

[KenCunningham]

Not an easy question without a bit more info. However, for starters you could try either;

tar -tvf [tapedrive name]

or:

cpio -itvB < [tapedrive name]

It's good practice to annotate a tape with the command used to write it, for use in situations such as these!

Good luck.

 

[crowe]

if you have no idea what utility was used to write the tape, or just want the &quot;raw&quot; data, you could also use dd in this format

# dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=/tmp/tape.out bs=512 count=2

this would get 1k of info off of the tape. keep in mind the tape device might be a little different than the example.

 

[deeway]

I just want to see what files are on the tape and the size.

these are the devices:

rmt0 Available 04-B0-00-6,0 4.0 GB 4mm Tape Drive
rmt1 Available 04-B0-00-2,0 Other SCSI Tape Drive

the backup is done with the tar command

 

[crowe]

just like Ken had mentioned then

# tar tvf /dev/rmt0

or

# tar tvf /dev/rmt1

depending on which drive you put the tape in.

 

[promise1]

how long does it take to extract from tape??

ie tar -xvf /dev/rmt0

No response from tape!!

 

[crowe]

You should see activity on the tape drive right after you hit return. Does it error off?

crowe

 

[230173]

Great!
Thanx for the response so far.

Can i just see the total size and number of files?

 

[KenCunningham]

You can see the number of files on the tape using:

tar -tvf /dev/rmt0 | wc -l

The | is a 'pipe' and is located as the shift of the \ key on my keyboard. wc -l gives a count of the lines produced by the tar command. Perhaps someone can help with the total size part?

HTH

 

[promise1]

no error off crowe.

i can list tha tape contents (tar -tvf /dev/rmt0) tho.

cheers
Promises

 

[KenCunningham]

Hmmm. Think I'm losing this a bit! If you can see the contents of the tape using the tar command then your tape appears to be working OK.