tcopy tape to tape WAY too slow

[Jesse Guardiani]

On Tuesday 30 March 2004 10:39, you wrote:
> In the last episode (Mar 30), Jesse Guardiani said:
> > I'm copying 35G/90G AIT-1 tapes on FreeBSD from tape drive to tape
> > drive (nrsa0 and nrsa1) using the tcopy -c command and it's taking
> > WAY too long. Over 12 hours including the verification process. (not
> > sure exactly how long as it finished when I was sleeping)
> >
> > Is there something I can do to speed this up?
>
> I don't think tcopy is double-buffered; if you only have one file on
> that tape and know the blocksize, dd if=/dev/nrsa0 bs=##k | dd
> of=/dev/nrsa0 bs=##k should be much faster.

No, I've got between 70 and 90 files per tape.


>  If you have multiple files
> or unknown blocksizes, the cptp command from the MAG package at
> http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/mag.html will preserve filemark and blocksize
> info through pipes, so you could do a cptp | cptp pipe.

That looks promising. Do you have special build instructions for this
package under FreeBSD 4.x?

I'm getting the following error on 'gmake' or 'make':

-------------------------------------------------------------
gcc -ansi -DUNIX -O -s -c tperr.c
tperr.c:18: initializer element is not constant
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/local/src/mag.
Exit 1
-------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
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