Tapes

• Tapes are used for back-ups
• The two basic (most popular) types of tape drives that I know of are:
  • DAT drives - usually (if not always) SCSI
  • TRAVAN drives - usually IDE

Useful Utilities

• mt
  • control magnetic tape drive operation
• tar
  • tar archiving utility
• cpio
  • copy files to and from archives
• dump
  • ext2 filesystem backup

DAT TAPE INFO

Tape Type	Storage Capacity*	Length
I (DDSI)	2G/4G	90 Meters
II (DDSII)	4G/8G	120 Meters
III (DDSIII)	12G/24G	125 Meters

• Capacity: Uncompressed/Compressed
  
  • Compression is done automatically
  • For example, with a Type I tape with data which lends itself to compression you'd be able to store approx. 4 GIGs of data; with data which is not able to be compressed, you'd be able to store approx. 2 GIGs of data.

liNUX & TRAVAN IDE TAPE DRIVES

• There are 2 modules (loadable device drivers) which you can try
  • ide-tape - IDE tape module (/dev/ht0, etc.)
  • ide-scsi - IDE - SCSI emulation module (/dev/st0, etc.)
• In order to get my SEAGATE 20 GB ATAPI (IDE) TAPE DRIVE to work, I needed to add the following lines to /etc/rc.local (I found the information on redhat's website)

  modprobe ide-scsi                           # load ide scsi emulation module
  hdparm -d0 /dev/hdf                         # disable dma (grep /var/log/messages to find name of your tape drive)
  mt -f /dev/st0 stoptions no-blklimits       # scsi tape options - shut off read block limits