This is literally the Command Center for almost all DATMAN operations. Once DATMANCC is executed, the tape drive becomes a part of Windows 95/98 and it can be accessed directly by Windows Explorer and other programs. The DATMAN Command Center window gives you the up-to-date status of the tape drive at all times. Also, any DATMAN-specific actions can be initiated from the Command Center's tool buttons or menus.
You can choose either the Large (standard) size or Small size as the style of the DATMAN Command Center main window. The smaller window reduces the screen congestion and helps you organize the desktop. The smaller window still provides the most essential command buttons and most of the vital status information.
The smaller window is adjustable in size and can be made even smaller to suit your taste. Or, you can remove all of the DATMAN windows from the desktop with the Tray Icon as the only visible sign of active DATMAN volume.
Many users like to keep the DATMANCC Status Window open when the tape is in action. The Status window augments the main DATMANCC window with detailed tape status and activities. It has four tabs, one of which is the History Table which is updated every time a new tape is mounted. It gives you a chronological list of sessions recorded on the tape. The visualization of the tape contents grouped into sessions reinforces user perceptions of the logical data organization on a DATMAN tape. It greatly helps the user to further exploit the access features and data retrieval activities.
The Activity Log window is especially useful in keeping track of the inner workings of the DATMAN software. It traces general file access activities such as file open, read, write and close requests. When you select the setting to include lower level SCSI activities, it can be a powerful debugging tool of the behaviors of the DATMAN File Engine itself and the SCSI host and the tape drive firmware. Capturing the activity log and sending it to DATMAN's technical support by E-Mail will make troubleshooting process much easier should you have any problems.
You can select any of the session catalogs in the History table to manually mount the volume. By doing so, you can access the tape as of the time the particular catalog was recorded (i.e., when the session was closed). This feature can be used to effectively "undo" any of the changes made on the volume subsequent to the catalog. For example, if certain files were deleted in the current session, mounting with the previous catalog allows you to access the deleted files.
It is helpful to know how DATMAN lays out data on the DATMAN tape. For historic reasons, partitions are numbered in descending order. The DATMAN tape is organized as a collection of sessions. A session recorded on the tape is made of user files followed by a catalog file which closes the session. Here, the diagram shows a tape that has three sessions. The first catalog in Partition 0, labeled CATALOG0 is the initial catalog recorded when the tape is formatted and is always empty. Note that the only data saved in the first partition (Partition 1) is a catalog file which is an exact replica of the most recent catalog (CATALOG3) in the main partition (Partition 0). Having the most recent catalog in Partition 1 at the beginning of the tape greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to mount the volume (Quick Mount).
DATMAN provides a various tape-scanning commands to examine the tape which are especially helpful when something goes wrong. For example, when the most recent catalog is damaged due to an abrupt power failure, you can always re-scan the tape for catalog files recorded on the tape. It can quickly reconstruct the history table which is located in the latest catalog under normal circumstances. This is one of the many redundant safety features designed into the DATMAN tape format. In short, the DATMAN design is based on the philosophy that many things can go wrong with the tape over the course of its history and yet a storage system has an enormous responsibility of retrieving user files under the most adverse conditions. On a DATMAN tape, severe damage to any part of the tape will not affect the recoverability of the files in the rest of the tape.
If you find a similarity of the list of catalogs in the Tape scan window to the history table, it is no coincidence. That is the fundamental data organization of the DATMAN tape format.
Here is another view of the DATMAN tape. Whereas the earlier Scan Catalogs Command examines the tape contents in fast but coarse view, the Scan Files Command gives you slower but finer view of the tape revealing every single action ever performed on the volume which modified either a file or directory in any way. For example, file writing, overwriting, renaming, deleting, and all other directory actions are recorded on the tape.
Here, the region of tape from Block 200,000 to Block 200,200 which is an arbitrarily chosen range, was scanned and the contents listed in the table. The files stored on the tape are detected by the scan action and the vital statistics are shown. This demonstrates the unrivaled power of DATMAN which is capable of retrieving any file on the tape without referencing any other data structure. Therefore, DATMAN is 100% immune from the all-too-often-familiar episodes of a missing or damaged catalog or index data which renders the entire user data stored on the tape useless in traditional tape backup software.
Finally, one more variation of DATMAN's scan command group (there are still more scan commands that are not shown here). The Scan Blocks command gives you a view of the lowest level of data structure on the tape. This command allows you to examine any block on the tape on a byte-by-byte basis. It shows a rendition of a block in hexadecimal and ASCII notation. This and similar commands in DATMAN allow you to examine and retrieve raw data on a tape written by software other than DATMAN. Some users find this feature useful in data transfer from UNIX to Microsoft platforms using the popular TAR format.