Tape imaging

[Tor Arntsen]

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).