How can I find what tapes are actually active?

This seems like an obvious question, and yet I'm stumped figuring outhow to do it.

I am backing up four machines onto vtapes that I burn to DVD. Becausethe vast majority of my data being backed up never changes, this isalmost effectively an archival setup (but not quite, and I'm notcurrently willing to set up different configs for the archival vs. non-archival, my setup works nicely for me).

My runspercycle is fairly high since I don't mind accumulatingincrementals over a fairly long period due to how little actual changeoccurs on a daily basis.

Naturally, as disks are promoted to balance out the load and as normaltiming comes around to run full backups, I end up with a number ofvtapes that are no longer active. Looking at my tapelist, I see thatall of the vtapes are currently listed as reuse and that there's noindication that tape 1 (for instance) is no longer "active" since themost recent full backup has effectively rendered it "inactive".

What I'd like to be able to do is have an automated way to tell whichvtapes have been superseded meaning that all of the backup images havemore recent images at that or lower level on a later tape.

Is there an automated way to do this currently? I'm sure that I candevise a way to go through the index files are build a model of thecurrent tape contents and note which ones are no longer active, but itfeels like something that ought to have been done already. Has it?


Thanks,
Bruce.