troubleshooting tape

On Sat, 2003-11-08 at 17:55, Bryce C wrote:
> Could your problem be that you have the ops backwards? I don't know
> about tar+tape but tar+file is
> tar -cvf out.tar file
> Also, the 'f' is for file output so you are trying to output to a file
> named home which can't be done because that's already a directory, and
> put /dev/ht0 in it. It blinks because it's being read. How about
> tar cv /dev/ht0 /home/
> ?

The correct way to backup /home to a tape device using tar would be:

tar cvf /dev/ht0 /home

or

tar cf /dev/ht0 /home

Leave out the 'v' if you don't want to watch all the filenames scroll
by, which can make some error messages disappear if you aren't watching
closely.

If you want to check the status of the tape drive:
mt -f /dev/ht0 status

HTH,

Jason Santos