Online Background Backups

Folks, I know you aren't supposed to do them, but our operators are archiving an entire data centers worth of disks off of several differing operating systems. To assist them in dealing with five different Online instances we use a script which asks the operator to mount the tape and then pipes a [RETURN] into tbtape -s. This has been working very successfully until engine number 5 came up several weeks ago and required multiple volumes for an archive. If we've sheltered the operator from the archive to this degree then how can we let them know about the second volume! What would be nice is to determine BEFORE the archive how much data was to be written. The only method I can think of offhand is to grab the number of diskwrites from tbstat -D and determine the number of writes - over a period of time - which required the second volume. Any thoughts? Thanx in advance j. _____________________________________________________________________________ Jack Parker - Contractor | Hewlett Packard, BSMC Boise, Idaho, USA| These don't look like opinions. jparker@hpbs2651.boi.hp.com | Are you sure they're mine? (208) 323-5388 (W) (208) 384-1623 (H) | _____________________________________________________________________________