On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 09:58:35 +0100
Kern Sibbald <kern AT sibbald DOT com> wrote:

> Thanks for mentioning that VolAddr is undocumented.  That was an 
> oversight that I will fix.
> 
> Please be aware that VolAddr is a relatively new bsr keyword, so it
> will not work on older Bacula's such as 5.2.x.  I don't remember when
> it was implemented.

Too bad for us: for administrative reasons we're stuck with 5.2.6 on
the box which is our tape SD.

> Note also: VolAddr is formed as you say for File and Tape volumes,
> but in the next version of Bacula, VolAddr is used for Cloud Volumes
> and the algorithm is not the same.  I will document it once it is
> released. Bottom line each driver, File, Tape, Aligned, Dedup,
> Cloud, ... has its own 64 bit VolAddr representation of the address.
> In this next version for File volumes for example, there is no longer
> any concept of File and Block there is only a 64 bit address.  For
> tapes, due to their architecture (currently) we still must have File
> and Block.

OK, so given that I can't use VolAddr with 5.2.6's bextract, is there a
way to make use of the two pairs of File+Block values extracted for a
particular job from the output of `bls -j` to create a sensible spec
for the bootstrap file to speed up extracts using `bextract`?

To provide an "executive summary" of our situation:

- We have old tapes with many backup sessions.  These sessions are
  always recorded sequentially; no jobs overlap.

- `bls -j` extracts two pairs of File+Block values for each job:
  the first denotes the beginning of the job, and the latter -- its end.

- We'd like to write a script which would consume the output of `bls -j`
  and produce a single bootstrap file for each job found, and we'd like
  these bootstrap files to somehow refer to those low-level "addresses"
  to speed up extractions via `bextract`.

Is there a way to do what we need w/o using VolAddr?

(Extraction based only on the list of file names takes more that two
hours for our LTO-4 drive and a full tape; this is unwieldy, and it's
sad to watch `bextract` scan the whole tape while it could be told to
just scan from there to there -- if only we knew how to do that.)

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