tape volume labelling

[Wolf N. Paul]

In article <188 at tnl.UUCP> norstar at tnl.UUCP (Daniel Ray) writes:
>Hi. I've just installed an Archive 60 Meg internal tape drive in my XENIX	
>386 2.2.2 system. What I'd like to do is write a tape volume label onto the
>header of each tape I use. Then, when I backup the filesystem each day, the
>system would read the label and reject writing to the tape if the wrong
>volume was inserted. Is there any non-trivial way to do this?
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^
Actualy, I think you want a trivial way, not a non-trivial (complicated) way :-)

Andy Tanenbaum (of MINIX fame) wrote a program called "vol" to make
MINIX backups to floppy using tar easier.

A day ago or so Nick Andrew posted a revised version of vol which writes
a header at the beginning of each volume, to serve just the purpose you
cite above, as well as to assure correct sequence in multi-volume backups.

The program should still be available in your local comp.os.minix, and should
be easy to adapt to almost any version of UNIX/XENIX, and to use with tapes
as well as floppies.

It really is trivial; all you need to make sure is that all your backups
are piped through "vol" to the tape, and reading the tape back, that you
let "vol" read the tape and pipe to tar, cpio, or whatever. When writing a
backup, "vol" will take care of writing the header before writing your data,
and when reading, it will take care to check and discard the header before
passing on the backup data.
-- 
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