Backing up to tape

[Sergey Matveev]

*** Frank Leonhardt [2018-04-25 21:00]:
>If I plug a SAS drive in to an HBA it'll just appear as /dev/sa0 (or similar)
>- right?
>
>Then I can backup everything with tar -cf /dev/sa0 /* - right?
>
>Is anyone using tape able to confirm any of this one way or another?

I have purchased Ultrium LTO5 SAS tape drive for several months ago and
use it with HardenedBSD. Everything you wrote is right. It appears
(connected through SAS HBA) as /dev/sa0, /dev/nsa0, /dev/esa0 and you
can directly use tar with it without any problems. mt command allows you
to rewind and seek records on the tape. And neither native tar supports
multivolume archives nor tape drive will do anything with it -- you have
to split volumes manually somehow. You can easily do something like:
zfs send zroot > /dev/sa0 to write your ZFS dataset directly to the tape
and then restore from it.

-- 
Sergey Matveev (http://www.stargrave.org/)
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