Thanks all.
Don't uncross those fingers but putting in a rewind, erase, rewind at the start of my backup script (on the SCSI drive) has written one tape successfully.
Cheers
R
-----Original Message-----
From: James Dutton <james.dutton@???>
Sent: 09 October 2024 12:42
To: rob@???; Hampshire LUG Discussion List <hampshire@???>
Cc: rmluglist2@???
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Tape drives - one can't read from t'other!
On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 at 12:07, rmluglist2--- via Hampshire <hampshire@???> wrote:
>
> So why would a LTO4 SCSI drive not be able to read from a LTO4 SAS drive when it can read LTO4 tapes written on another machine?
> FWIW the write command I’m using is:
> tar czvf /dev/nst0 files_to_write
> For reading, I use:
> dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=1M | tar xzvf –
Hi,
I don't know if it is helpful or not, but back in the day when we used tape backups, we used an open source backup software called "bacula".
https://www.bacula.org/
Our tape drives were attached to a Linux Server, and the bacula agents backed up both Windows and Linux client and servers.
It was kind of idiot proof, because it would tell you which tape to put in when and would only write the backups to the correct tape.
The tapes had barcodes on them, and the tape drive read the barcodes to identify whether it had the correct tape or not.
If it had any problems with the backup it could be made to send emails, sms messages etc.
We did a test restore once every 3 months.
If we just wished to restore a single file from a particular date in history, it told us which tape we needed.
It avoids the need for tar and dd commands like you have above.
With the problems you are seeing with your tape drives, I suggest you send them to get serviced.
A service is generally good for 1 year.
Kind Regards
James
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