Josh Coates wrote:
Lets face it- as painfull as some tapes are to read,
you can usually [with a little patience] pull one out
from 10-20 years ago and pull data off it [if it was
written correctly, if the guy who wrote it verified he
had his data on the tape]-- and you can do this
regardless of wether it was VAX, HP-UX, Sun etc...
i'm going to go out on a limb here, but i'm going to guess you've never
/actually/ tried this before...
-josh
True statement... I have never /actually/ tried this before. Oldest
tapes I've pulled data off of were 4-5 years old... but I know guys who
have...
One of the guys recommended using GNU version of tar and writing with -z
[compression]. The ideas is that with the compression- the keys/cksums
to uncompress data are interleaved w/ the archived data and you can
verify integrity of data by listing the archive -- [tar -tz]. I use to
use this on DDS1 tapes, but found issues on the Sun boxes w/ DDS3/4
tapes. Sometimes [if I'm trying to really pack data in] I'll create a
tar file on the system, then use gzip or bzip2 to pack it down- then use
the standard sun tar command to drop it on tape. If you can read this
file off the tape and list it out [gnu]tar -xv[z|j]f, you've got some
assurance that the tape was written correctly.
Justin Gedge
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