[H-GEN] Linux backup tool of choice

[Stuart Longland]

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Marco Grigull wrote:

> Whilst on the subject of tapes and drives, how hard would it be to
> implement a filesystem on a scsi tape, either from scratch or using
> something like udf/packet driver?  I think the consideration would be
> the tape drive device is a character device ...

Hmmm, I get what you're trying to do, but I think the real problem is
that it would be *very* slow.

Just looking at tar, it could be done, but I have very little experience
with tape drives under UNIX.  (I only just the other day acquired a
Colorado 350 MB Floppy Tape drive - works under Linux using the ftape
driver).

In tar, (or at least the version I have under Cygwin), you could use an
option something like the following to fetch a file and spit it out on
STDOUT.  The following command I think will do this:

tar -xOf <TAPE_DEVICE> <FILE>

This should look on <TAPE_DEVICE> (In my case, /dev/ftape) for a file
called <FILE>.  So with this in mind, you could use a tape drive like an
audio casette with the following command:

tar -XOf <TAPE_DEVICE> <FILE.raw> | play -r 44100 -c 2 -f s -s w

This should go looking for a RAW PCM audio file called <FILE.raw> and
play it.  As far as putting the RAW PCM audio file on there in the first
place, I don't see a -I or --from-stdin option anywhere, so I think this
would have to be done in two steps, record the file, then put it on the
tape.

- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Griffith Student No:           Course: Bachelor/IT @ Nathan |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
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