Looking to read past EOT on DDS/DLT/LTO

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2017, Nico de Jong wrote:

> I did some research, and the most reasonable outcome was that it was not 
> possible by normal means, because some algorithm reading synchronisation 
> data couldnt find out what was happening, so, the backup was ruined.....

 Odd.  This would imply you couldn't wind a tape past a medium error and 
read what's behind, but I surely did it a couple of times with DDS tapes. 

 And this is exactly why I gave up on some proprietary (OSF/1 IIRC) `dump' 
utility as it recorded an archive directory at the beginning making the 
whole archive unusable if an error developed there.  OTOH `tar' keeps file 
information along with actual data spreading it across the archive, so any 
medium error only causes the immediately affected file to be lost.  Same 
with `cpio' (except for the arcane CLI).

  Maciej