The things I do to torture myself... I am trying to copy the baan master tape to another tape. My thoughts are, why back up the systems and not have a backup of the master tape also?

Anyway, is there an easier way to do this rather than (note I've only got one tape drive on each server):

dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn | remsh server "dd of=/dev/rmt/0mn"

Apparently there are tons of "catalogs" on this tape and I've had to re-exec this dd several times to get each chunk.

Call me paranoid, but I'd really like to have a backup of my master tape. The catch, of course, is it would need to be an accurate one! :D

Thanks!

Personally, once I have moved the installation to tape I make a copy on another disk, and also burn a cd. I don't trust tape for the long run and sometimes don't have ready access to the tape drive. Once on cd I can put it in any pc and ftp it back to the unix box.

I have had to install many times from remote locations and I find that cd is the way to go.

You could try the following (preferrably on a 'spare' machine):

- Pretend that you want to install BAAN, so run the script that reads tape and dumps everything to a specified directory
- Now that you have the stuff on the disk, make all the copies you want. Remember to document a change note on the installation procedure if you have to use your own copies.

OR:
- Order extra master tapes from BAAN. They would charge for it, but it will spare you the hassles.