Question in occasion of SCSI devices (the tape store)

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Nick wrote:

> What is it you are actually trying to do? Read the tape? Write
>
>>something to it?  Perform backups?  Without that basic information it's
>>hard to actually help.
>>
>I try to build reserve copy of information on it actually I want read
>and write information on it
>
>  
>
And what format is this information in?

If it had been tar'ed to the tape you would say something like:
    tar -tv -f /dev/sa0
to list the contents and
    tar -xv -f /dev/sa0
to extract.

But if it had been written with, say, dd then something like

    dd if=/dev/sa0 of=/your/output/file

might do to read it, but you'd probably want to set a blocksize with 
e.g. bs=32k or bs=64k but that depends on how the tape was written.

So how was the tape written?

--Alex

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