[http://www.fanl.gov/docs/products/fmb/separate_mounts.html]

Doing mounts separately from backups with fmb

Simple case, backups run before Midnight

Basically, if you were doing in crontab: 

5 23 * * * fmb_backup -f this -f that ...
to run a backup at 11:05 PM, you can instead do 

5 14 * * * fmb_verify -f this -f that ... -k
5 23 * * * fmb_backup -f this -f that ... -m quiet
and you can run the fmb_verify at 2:05PM day to verify that we can mount the tape, and keep it in the drive, and the backup will then use the "quiet" mount type and assume the tape is in the drive when it runs at 11:05pm

Note that you should not change any of your backup config files to make this change; the "-m quiet" on the fmb_backup line will overide whatever mount scheme you have in any of your config files, and you want the original mount scheme to be used for the fmb_verify.

Harder case, backups run after Midnight

If you're running the backup after midnight, that is your crontab looks like the following to run at 3:00AM 

5 03 * * * fmb_backup -f this -f that ...
the above change doesn't do what you want, since the when the backup runs it will always find yesterday's tape in the drive. The quick, but dirty, hack is to set the timezone when you're doing the fmb_verify, so that fmb_verify thinks it's in the middle of the Pacific, just over the International date line, then when the backup runs at 3:00 in the morning 

5 14 * * * TZ="CHADT-12" fmb_verify -f this -f that ... -k
5 03 * * * fmb_backup -f this -f that ... -m quiet
and pretend we're just over the International date line where it's tomorrow already when we do the mount verification.

Note that you should not change any of your backup config files to make this change; the "-m quiet" on the fmb_backup line will overide whatever mount scheme you have in any of your config files, and you want the original mount scheme to be used for the fmb_verify.