On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 7:12 AM, Emmanuel Kasper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is it possible to use something a hard drive cartridge like this > http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_rd1000?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd > as a "real" tape device in Amanda ? ( Not vtape ) > I was wondering if there are physical properties of a hard drive which > prevent it from being used like a tape.
Tapes are linear access, character devices, with peculiar semantics for distinguishing files, etc. Hard disks, on the other hand, are block devices and usually expose a filesystem interface, on top of which Amanda *emulates* tape semantics. So the supported way to treat a hard disk as a tape is exactly the vfs device driver (vtape). There are certainly other ways to do it (write a new kernel device driver or write a new Amanda device driver that does something different from the vfs device driver), but I don't see any benefit. Dustin
