SCSI tape question

Johnny Billquist bqt at update.uu.se
Fri Dec 12 11:45:04 CST 2014


On 2014-12-12 18:29, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 12/12/2014 09:10 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
>> Two tape marks is just a convention used by some software to indicate
>> the logical EOT. It has no special meaning for the hardware. In fact,
>> standard ANSI formatted tapes can legally contain two consecutive tape
>> marks without it being the EOT. ANSI instead have a special record to
>> indicate EOT.
>
> Old tapes are extremely variable on their use of ANSI labels, so when
> archiving, I'll read as far as possible (i.e. either to EOT or a "blank
> media" exception.

You mean old OSes...? :-)

> And then there's Unix/Linux and many other OSes that don't give a fig
> about ANSI labels.

Even for OSes that do give a fig about ANSI labels, they are not the 
bible. You can read the tapes without using that layer on any OS...
It's just another layer you can use in between, to give some more structure.

	Johnny



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