On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 at 12:55pm, Martin wrote

> I've been trying to do a manual restore as well, just in case an
> amrecover/amrestore is not possible. Paul, you say that it is possible to
> skip over backup images by using the fsf parameter. That's true, but is
> there any way of determining WHERE a particular image is stored on tape? I

You can run 'amtoc' after each night's backups, and store the results on 
another machine.  That gives you the order.

> did a few dd grabs, but the images I get back don't really match any
> definable order (disklist, email-output). Is there a way to (quickly) tell
> what order the images are in?

If you don't a priori have the order, the quickest way is to just read the 
first 32k of each tape 'file' -- that's the amanda header, and has the 
relevant info without requiring you to read the whole image.  The process 
would look like this:

mt rewind
mt fsf 1 (skip tape header)
dd if=/dev/tape of=header.1 bs=32k count=1
(read header, it's not the one we want)
mt fsf 1 (go to start of next file)
dd if=/dev/tape of=header.2 bs=32k count=1
(read header, it's the one we want)
dd if=/dev/tape of=image.2 bs=32k (get the image)

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University