Tape Drive & Tape Archival questions...

[der Mouse]

> 2. Archiving the tapes in a useful format.

> Regarding #2, I don't have an incredible amount of experience dealing
> with tape, so I'm looking for suggestions for how best to archive
> these tapes without losing any important information.

I'd suggest copytape, or something basically equivalent.  (copytape is
a data format for recording tape contents including block boundaries
and tape marks, and a program for converting either way between that
format and real tapes.  The version I use can be found in
ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/local/src/copyutape/ for them as
wants.)

Now, as I understand it, most (all?) QIC drives do not fit the
canonical Unix tape model; they are streams of 512-byte blocks, not
streams of variable-length records.  However, since a copytape-format
dump of the tapes would allow you to recreate the tapes, given media
and drive, it can be considered a lossless storage format.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B