Named Tapes

Situation

  For the appendable tapes to be truly useful, you need to be able to
  set up a crontab entry for things like daily backups, and forget
  about it.  Problem is, we need to tell all-backups what tape it is
  appending to when it runs.  If we invoke all-backups at the start of
  the week, and it promises tape exb-123, we don't want to have to
  remember to run all-backups -t exb-123 all week or worse, edit the
  crontab files).  A simple solution would be to allow for tape
  aliases.

Implementation

  We could make a simple program that picks a free tape according to
  certain specs and assigns a name to it.  If that name was already
  assigned to another tape, it should ask for confirmation before
  reusing it.  Once assigned, you should be able to use the aliases
  anywhere you would have been able to use the tape ID.  

  For example, we say 

    name-tape `promise -f 1 1` daily

  to get a free tape that we can insert in drive 1 and name it daily.
  The alias "daily" will refer to this tape when we run all-backups now.

  Then the crontab entry can say "all-backups -t daily..." and it will
  just work...

Comments

  This probably isn't useful apart from the "appendable tapes" scheme.