Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Thu May 2 12:18:09 2002

Raymond Moyers <rmoyers_at_nop.org> wrote:
> > At 02:01 AM 5/2/2002 -0700, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> >I can use dd to slurp
> >stuff off of tape, but it's tedious. What tools are people using for
> >tape archiving under Linux or Solaris? AIX seems to come with "tcopy"
> >that essentially pulls everything off the tape until logical or physical
> >EOT. I'm looking for something similar - point it at the drive and
> >siphon it on down.
>
> Whats wrong with cat ?

What's wrong with cat (and dd, and arguably the whole Un*x concept of
files-as-bytestreams for that matter) is that it loses information. A
magnetic tape is not an ordered stream of bytes, it is an ordered
stream of files of records, and each record has a length. So you are
forced to result to multiple disk files to maintain the file structure
(which adds to your hassle because now you need to manage collections
of files instead of a single tape), and as you are copying the files
to bytestreams you lose the record length information.

This may come across as a flame of Un*x, and maybe it is, but really
my point is that the Un*x model of files as bytestreams is not an
appropriate model for magnetic tapes.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 12:18:09 BST

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