Recovering data from 4mm and 8mm tapes/ftape advice

[Chuck Guzis]

On 03/24/2015 01:32 AM, Dave G4UGM wrote:
> I read somewhere that manufacturers implemented compression and the
> schemes were incompatible between drive makers. Perhaps this has
> caused issues for some..

I do recall, back in my dim memory, that when I was writing software for 
the DDS, DLT and 8mm drives, that I would turn off all of extra vendor 
features when creating tapes.    There were some interesting differences 
in the DDS1 drives.   And vendor-unique features differed considerably. 
  Some drives, for example, allowed for read-after-write (i.e. rewriting 
of a block), but not all did.

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Speaking of tapes, and not wanting to hijack the thread, but does anyone 
here have experience with the Linux ftape (floppy tape) drivers?  I'm 
about to install them on a Debian Woody setup and wonder if there's 
anything that I should be aware of.  I *think* that Woody was the last 
distro before they were dropped altogether.

--Chuck