UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I have kinda inherited this problem, but was wondering if anyone else had any ideas.

Currently all our backup rentention periods are set to 2 weeks, so that we can cycle through tapes (save money etc...). Anyhow the guys next door in IT, decided one day long long ago, that it would be a good idea to do monthly backups. Unfortunatley, they didn't tell us this, and so it has now become a problem.

My question is this. Does anyone know of a way to well, essentially by-pass veritas NBU on a vertias volume managed system, and restore things from tape. I know that I can do this from a VXRESTORE, however its an oracle rman backupset that I am looking to restore and normal file system and I didn't use a vxdump in the first place (well I prosume NBU didn't anyhow).

From an OS point of view under Solaris I managed to find some utilities TCOPY and MT. MT doesn't seem to allow me to do this. However TCOPY seems like a good solution, however, it will only copy from tape to a dir, I prosume the entire tape, and being that we don't really have systems with a 200gig + mount point at the moment, I don't fancy trying it.

Has anyone got any other ideas for something that I use? Ideally I would like to be able to mount the tape and see whats on it, and decided what to restore myself.

thanks,

Mark.