Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello Experts,

I've got a shell script that makes the backup of the files that i want. I also have this script showing the amount of files backed up and in witch folders they are.
It's only missing one thing.

I got all the information beeing stored in a text file and all i've got to do is to see that file in the morning to see if all went well. The problem is that i may not know if the tapes are beeing changed daily as it is supposed to. So the trick is to know the tape serial number, because i use one tape for each day of the week.

How can i accomplish this?
Witch script can return me the serial number of the tape?

Thank you so much,

Jorge Ferreira

Hello Jorge

I think it would be better to label your tapes in order to be able to identify them.
The command to write a label to the tapes obviously depends on your O.S.

Ok.
My OS is the UnixWare SCO 7.
How to label the tapes then?


Thank you for your reply.

Jorge

How are you doing the backup. What software are you using. When the previous person talked about labeling the tape, he meant to write a logical label to the tape. This will not work (for example) if you are writing to the tape as a raw device using something like tar. If it isn't too big. put the backup script into a note.

Ok, this is the deal.

The backup is being made by a tar command, directly to the tape. Something like: tar cvf ./xpto /dev/tape

In this script i check the time of start and end of the script and the amount of files in each directory copied. Each of these informations are being sent to a text file wich is created with the "DayMonthYear.txt" format. Something like 01122004.txt.

Another information i would like to put in these text files is if the backup is being made to the right tape. Because the backup of Friday wouldn't be made to the Wednesday tape. Tapes' got to be chaged daily.

So aparently the trick is to know witch tape is in the drive. If i can label my tapes and then check the label in the script, I would have the problem solved.

That's it,

Thak you for all your replies,


Jorge Ferreira

Sorry, your out of luck. Tar writes to the tape as a raw device. While you can have multiple tars on a tape (seperated by EOF marks), you can't logically label the tape.

Maybe it's better to post the script to see if there's anything that can be done.