In a message dated: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:14:02 EST
Jon LaBadie said:

>Quick answer is sure, just overwrite the 32KB first file on the tape.
>
>Longer answer dependes on what you want to do with the tape and how
>much you expect amanda to remember about the tape, its contents, and
>its new label.
>
>To overwrite it, do a "dd if=<tapedevice> of=<sometmpname> bs=32k".
>Maybe make a copy of <sometmpname> so if you mess up you can restore it.
>Next edit the file <sometmpname> to change the tape name. Then
>rewind the tape and do the same dd command with 'if' and 'of' reversed.
>
>Note, after doing this amanda has an invalid concept of what is on the
>tape.  It still thinks the other tape exists and has valid contents.
>Depending on what new tape name you choose, the modified tape is either
>not known by amanda's index (a new tape name) or does not match the
>index's listing of the contents.

Hmm, okay.  Ideally I'd like amanda's knowledge of what's on the tape 
to change with the tape label.

This is the problem:  I have a configuration called 'archive', the 
sole purpose of which is be stored off site indefinitely.  There a 
no-reuse policy on these tapes.  The tape labels are of the form
'YYYY-Q[1-4]-Tape-X/Y'  This way,  I need only know from which 
quarter I need to restore from should I ever need to pull one of 
these tapes from storage.  Last week I ran this configuration and 
labelled the tape as 1/2, but we only used 1 tape, not 2.

What want to accomplish is changing this tape to be 1/1 instead of 1/2.
So, I can either edit the tape header and the amanda database, or 
dump the tape to disk, then flush it to a new tape, which actually 
sounds easier.  

So, how would I extract the contents of a tape so I could flush it to 
another tape?

-- 
Seeya,
Paul

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