Hi!,
Its been a long time since I used any kind of tape drive with unix, but
here's what I remember:
1. You can only mount a block device such as a hard disk, a floppy or a
CD. A tape is a character device.
2. You have to know what device name Linux assigns to your tape drive.
On my RH 6.2 system (which has no tape drive) I can see in the
/dev/directory files like rmt* (which are tape devices) and smtpe?
(which might be, I don't know).
3. There are special utilities for handling tape drives on unix/Linux.
You could install those (I don't remember the name, not having used
them, but it could be a package called mtutils).
4. Even if you don't have these utilities, you can, following unix
philosophy, just use the tape drive as another file. If its known to
your system as, say, /dev/rmt8, you could do:
tar -zcvf /dev/rmt8 .
(note the trailing dot!) to gzip and tar all your files from the current
directory onto your tape backup. Just make sure the drive is not write
protected.
To restore the backup just do:
tar -zxvof /dev/rmt8
Of course this has a problem: its hard to add stuff to an existing tape
archive. Nonetheless, its worth going through all of the tar man page,
you just might find a way of doing this!
- Manas Laha
Rashwan wrote:
>
> Hi ,
>
> I am new to linux .
>
> I have Installed a tape drive and scsi card on
> Linux7.1. , Kudzu has detected the New hardware "the
> card " but I can't mount on see the Tape Drive
> ........ I need to back up stuff form my drive , which
> will not go long ,
>
> The Tape drive is HPC1599 .
> Thanks
> Rashwan
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