10 Aug
2016
10 Aug
'16
7:42 a.m.
On 8/10/16 7:04 AM, Tor Arntsen wrote:
On 10 August 2016 at 15:22, <aswood at
t-online.de> wrote:
congratulations, you reinvented .tap format.. badly.
how did you handle unreadable blocks.
I successfully took a (factory new) DEC TSZ07
SCSI tape drive into operation using a Sun SS20 and a Linux box.
Now I do have a big pile of CDC, DEC, HP, Convex and IBM tapes and I'd like to create
tape images to file to save the tapes content.
What is the to be preferred procedure to image the tapes, which software to use and which
kind of format to store the images?
fwiw, I made my own format when I archived all my old tapes. A very simple one:
- I read the tape record by record
- The output disk file contains a 4-byte integer in big endian format,
followed by one record.
- The 4-byte integer contains the physical record size as read from the tape.
- Then another 4-byte value plus a new record, and so on.
- End-of-file markers are encoded by using 0 as the value for the
4-byte integer, with no record following (logically enough).