7 Aug
2006
7 Aug
'06
9:54 a.m.
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.
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