We are in the process of recreating old electronic mail for selected users in response to a request from our legal department. The mail software we use makes this a cumbersome process. We restore a couple of top level files for each user to a system that is normally used for testing mail software updates. We run a diagnostic utility to get a list of missing files referenced in the top level files. We restore those files. We rerun the diagnostic utility to get a further list of missing files referenced in the restored files. We repeat the diagnostic and restore cycle until we get a clean diagnostic.
It is fairly easy to reformat the list of files from the diagnostic utility into a list of restore commands. Unfortunately, the files are spread over nine tapes and this approach has no particular tendency to group files by tape. We end up with almost as many tape mounts as there are files. We can use 'dsmc q backup' to find out when each file was backed up and sort the requests by backup time. This helps somewhat but we still get many tape mounts. I can get volume information using the 'show version' and 'show bfo' commands, but 'show version' takes longer than a typical tape mount (there are over 4.5 million backup files in the filespace involved). Is there a faster way to find out which volume a specific file is on? Alternatively, is there an automated mechanism for converting the list of files into dsm GUI selections? The mail server and the restores run under HP-UX. The GUI display usually ends up on a PC running the Exceed X Terminal emulator.
