Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!NYBVX1.BITNET!DDOBKIN
From: DDOBKIN@NYBVX1.BITNET (Daniel B Dobkin)
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: BACKUP tape problem
Message-ID: <8608090429.AA18517@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Sat, 9-Aug-86 00:29:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8608090429.AA18517
Posted: Sat Aug  9 00:29:37 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Aug-86 10:23:06 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 30
Approved: info-vax@sri-kl.arpa

We have a rather serious problem here that I hope someone will be able to
help us with: we've just discovered that many of our weekly save tapes are
unreadable by Backup, although Backup wrote them just fine.

Here's what's happened: We have a command procedure which our operators use
to perform full (weekly) and incremental (daily) saves.  The procedure
correctly initializes the first tape before BACKUP is invoked, and so
someone (no names, please) made the not unreasonable assumption that BACKUP
would initialize further volumes using a variant of the first volume label;
the utility goes merrily along, writing data on the tape, until it needs a
new tape.  Now begins the fun: apparently, BACKUP does nothing to ensure
that subsequent tapes are appropriately labelled when doing a write
operation.  Only after someone needed a file restored from the second or
third tape did we discover that BACKUP complains about the tape not being
ANSI-labelled.

Now we're in the uncomfortable position of having a pile of tapes we can't
read.  Has anyone else encountered this?  Obviously, we're making sure that
all of our tapes get initialized before beginning our weekly saves, but that
does nothing for salvaging the bum tapes we already have.  Does anyone have
any ideas for how we can copy the "bad" tapes to ones that are ANSI labelled?
And, to satisfy myself, is this a feature?  Or something that should be
SPR'd?


Daniel B Dobkin
New York University
Graduate School of Business

DBD@NYBVX1.BITnet