I have two machines with tape units I'm trying to set up to do backups for
Linux (that is on the machines with dual boot).
The first machine has a Conner Tapestor 420 that uses QW5122F tapes (200 MB
uncompressed, 420 MB compressed). I think this can run under ftape (it is
on the list), but I'm not sure about some things. For example, should the
device be a rewinding or non-rewinding device. If I have to declare a
buffer, what size should I use? The machine runs Corel Linux and Corel
didn't include an ftape device although they did include the ftape driver.
They also included a copy of BRU, which has been useless thus far because
the setup is close to incomprehensible. It has taken me almost 6 months of
occasionally searching in a wide variety of places to get this far on a
product that is supposed to work "out of the box". I recently figured out
how to set up a device, but I'm not sure which device to set up.
The second machine has a Sony Superstation. The Linux on that machine is
Red Hat 6.1. I couldn't find the Sony Superstation on the ftape
compatibility list. I finally figured out that is because it is an
EIDE/ATAPI device, which is not covered by ftape. However, the ftape HOWTO
only talks about the ATAPI driver, not about what it takes to actually
write the tape (including formats, etc.). I looked at the QIC web page,
and apparently the running of a tape depends on two specs: the command
spec and the format spec. I suppose ATAPI is the command spec, but what am
I suposed to do about the format, and how do I run it? Is there any place
to look for how to use ATAPI tapes?
Any help I can get will be appreciated.
Stan Klein
