Joining the list of "my format" posts ... Mine also records retry information (because MPE on the HP 3000 optionally reports if a retry was done to get a successful tape read), and setmarks (which differ from EOFs), as well as error information. (That retry information is important ... it could indicate a silent loss of information.)
But, I must admit...it didn't occur to me to store metadata like a photo of the tape, etc. Nice! When copying / archiving tapes ... One important thing to do, depending upon your operating system and tape drive characteristics of course, is to issue read requests for a few bytes more than you expect ... because with some OSs and some kinds of drives, if you ask for X bytes and the record has more than X, you'll quietly get X and the rest will be discarded. (That came up in a court case where I was an expert witness ... an alleged 'expert' had copied a 9-track tape (badly) and lost data because the records were larger than he expected, and his copying tool didn't have that simple safeguard in it.) A second thing is to be somewhat aggressive in reading the 'end' of the tape. The backup tapes I frequently encounter supposedly end with two EOFs in a row ... except for a few that happen to have extra data past that point :) (Of course, with 9 track tapes, you run the risk of going off the end!) (Yes, that begs the question...if you're archiving a tar tape ... do you *want* the data past the first EOF? (Which could be part of a prior (and longer) tar, or something else.)) (And then there are the people who put tar after tar after tar on the same tape :) Stan
