UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there, I have a few unlabled tapes that have just been dropped over the floor. I need to find out the date the tapes were created so I can label them up correctly. I dont need to know whats on the tape, just the date it was created or last modified.

To be honest I have no idea what I am doing here, as the guy that normall does this is off. If anyone could help me out here I would be so grateful!

Thanks in advance!!

Tapes do not normally have a date on them, like files do. So you are out of luck.

What you would have to do is pretty time consuming. I would label them as spilled for now until the regular guy gets back.

Basically for us to help you we would have to know how the data was written to tape, for example as a tar archive, compressed tape librarian system archive, etc. Then depending on the archive type and whether or not you use some kind of backup system like Overland, run a possibly complex series of commands. I don't think you have those answers or you would not have asked the question the way you did.

Tapes generally don't hold filesystems, just raw data, so whether they have any date information on them depends entirely on what kind of data they have in them. But I suspect not.

---------- Post updated at 10:35 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:34 AM ----------

Dropping a tape can do worse things to it than mixing up the labelling, incidentally.