Splitting tar output

[Michael ODonnell]

>Yikes!  Did I attach this to your thread or is that just the way it 
>shows up on my Kmail?  I didn't mean to do that.

You did, but it's no big deal.  If you're going to do
mea culpas about your email format I'd rather it was about
your MIME headers forcing a UTF-8 charset on us...            ;->

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>> After that point I'd then instead consider just saying:
>>
>>    dd if=$bkdir/monthly.tar of=/dev/st0 ibs=X obs=Y
>
>I tried that, but when I ask tar to access the tape to get a file or 
>list the archive contents, it reports "Cannot read... Error is not 
>recoverable.  Exiting now."

What do we know about this tape drive?  Has it ever been seen to
work?  Under what circumstances?  What if you try stuff like:

   dd if=/dev/st0 ibs=X of=/dev/null

...with steadily increasing values of X (512,1k,2k,4k,8k,etc)
in an attempt to verify that ANYTHING can be read off the drive.
 (NB - tape must already have bits on it...          ;->  )

Are there any other entries under /dev that allow access to
that same device, perhaps with different charactristics?


>Apparently tar uses a different format on tape and disk.

No.  Whatever else is going on here, I'll tell you that is
not the case.  tar neither knows nor cares where the bits end
up and the layout of the bits is independent of the medium.


>Also, I pay the time penalty of writing the disk file then the
>tape file in tandem.  This isn't such a big problem as to force
>rescheduling of my family time, but I thought there might be some
>more time-efficient method I was overlooking.

Writing the disk file first and then cloning it to tape is
almost certainly the most efficient approach, and likely the
most reliable, as well.  The problem is apparently just figuring
out how to get the bits onto and off of the tape, which is not
tar's responsibility.


>I assumed this was a simple matter of linking some Linux utilities 
>together - that was 2 days ago.

Heh.  Now sounds like a good time to stop and take a few deep
breaths, and maybe even make a few therapeutic BAC adjustments,..