6 Mar
2013
6 Mar
'13
3:21 p.m.
From: Steve Merrony
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 6:10 AM
What is the current best practice for creating an
image of a SCSI tape
in such a way that it can later be used to reliably make a replica of
that tape?
I have a fully functioning SCSI tape drive (via Linux
at the moment) and
want to image various sorts of Data General (and other) tapes safely and
also duplicate a couple of them. They are in various odd formats. I
can use the non-rewinding device (/dev/nrst0 etc) to get individual
files off the tapes but that is tedious and writing a tape like that
seems like a nightmare.
Since the format for all of the machines of interest to me is 9-track 1/2",
I use tools I wrote for TOPS-20 which image and restore .TAP and .TPC files,
using 9-track SCSI tape drives. Rather than reading *data*, I read raw
8-bit tape frames, treat them as 8-bit bytes, and leave them the hell alone
for all other purposes.
But that's just me.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/