On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 12:55:28PM +0100, Nicki Messerschmidt, Linksystem 
Muenchen GmbH wrote:
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> Hi,
> at a customer I recently switched from tape backup to file device backup
> due to a tape drive failure. Now, after the real tape drive is back
> again, I'd like to tape the harddisk content to tape.
> 
> How do I do this?
> Does "for i in $TAPEPATH/*; do dd if=$i of=$TAPEDEV bs=32k; done" the job?
> 

That might get them onto the tape, but not in a form usable by amanda.
I'm not certain how one goes about making it suitable for amanda.

Here are the problems I see with the approach.

- no tape header file identifying the tape, date, ...
- no tape trailer file indicating end of tape
- no amanda index info saying which tape contains which dumps
- no amanda index info saying the position on the tape for each dump

Did you name the virtual tapes the same as the physical tapes?
If so, then maybe, note the maybe - I'm very unsure, you might be
able to do the loop above to a physical tape of the same name.
It would have to be sandwiched between dd's of the header and trailer.

OTOH, what you propose is non-destructive to the vtape data.  So you
could do a sample and check it emperically.

Any chance of just keeping the vtapes around for a tapecycle?
Keep a copy of the amanda.conf dir tree as it stands now.  Then
change the working copy to physical tapes configuration.  Should
you need to recover from the vtapes, rename the config dirs.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)