Tape imaging

[Al Kossow]

On 8/10/16 7:04 AM, Tor Arntsen wrote:
> On 10 August 2016 at 15:22,  <aswood at t-online.de> wrote:
>> 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).
>

congratulations, you reinvented .tap format.. badly.

how did you handle unreadable blocks.