Re: Tape handling in Linux

The dd command seems to like the tape... kinda.  I had to skip the first
four "records" which seem to be a way to tell VMS what kind of tape it
is when it's being mounted "foreign".

I now have a file on my system:

-rw-r-----    1 root     root     15540736 Aug 21 23:20 becca.bck

which is 239 records of 65534-byte records.

If I try to cat it (obviously with more,) it seems to have my stuff
there.  I'm going to burn it to a CD/RW disc, and take it to work with
me next week and see if I can d/l it and expand the backup on the
OpenVMS system.  

God, I wish that I'd somehow managed to save a printout of what backups
were on this tape, and how I'd made them...

Anywho... thanks to everyone for your assistance.  If someone has any
other ideas, please send them my way! :)

Becca

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 22:09, Eric Koldeweij wrote:
> As the kernel has already recognized the streamer you won't need any 
> special driver. The tape drive can be accessed by the device name (as 
> mentioned) /dev/stx where x is the tape drive number. Since you have 
> only one tape drive I assume, its device name will be /dev/st0
> 
> There are several standard utilities for tape streamers. one important 
> one is "mt" This can be used for non-backup related tape actions like 
> rewind the tape (mt rewind), tape drive status (mt status) and many 
> more. See "man mt" for details.
> 
> I personally use the good ol' tar utility for my backups. After all, 
> it's what tar's originally made for :)
> for instance "tar cfvz /dev/st0 /" makes a complete backup of the whole 
> directory structure to the tape.
> See "man tar" for details......
> 
> I have no idea how VMS stores its backups on tape and I also don't know 
> if there's a utility able to read VMS-type backup tapes. What is 
> possible in any case is to copy an image of the whole tape into a file 
> on disk, you should use the "dd" command for that. You could use regular 
> file-based tools to decode the image just as if it was read from tape. 
> It's also a great way to copy a tape :)
> Again the man command should help here; man dd for details on Linux' 
> data dump utility.
> 
> Last but not least, as the device name is a "file" in the linux file 
> system, basically any standard unix command will work on the tape drive. 
> Whether it's useful is another matter of course. For instance "cp 
> somefile /dev/st0" will work like a charm and copy the file somefile to 
> tape (hereby destroying the tape's previous contents) as raw data. It's 
> pretty useless, because you can't copy more than one file to tape and 
> expect to be able to retrieve it, but it shows that you can more or less 
> treat your tape drive like a regular file in Linux. I have once tried to 
> catch a hacker by rerouting my system log messages to the tape drive. It 
> worked :)
> 
> Have fun with it :)
> 
> Eric.
> 
> Becca Putman wrote:
> 
> >Hi, all!
> >
> >Yet another Linux newbie... having found that Linux has been able to
> >identify and install software for everything in my system, I thought I'd
> >try something exotic.  I purchased an old Digital (DEC) TZ87 tape drive
> >and an Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI adapter (this is the SCSI-2 adapter with
> >only 50-pin connectors; not a wide or fast/wide)
> >
> >RedHat found my scsi adapter and installed it.  It even sees my TZ87,
> >but I don't think a driver has been installed for it.  My hardware
> >browser says: 
> >Selected Device: Dec TZ87  (C)DEC
> >   Manufacturer: Unknown
> >         Driver: none or built-in
> >         Device: /dev/st
> >

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