The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide - File marks
tar
There is at least one peculiarity when using the tar
program with
tape devices. The problem is, that tar
writes its own kind-of
end of file (EOF) mark to the tape. This `EOF
' mark consists
simply of one or more zeroed tar records (data entities of 512
bytes). tar
stops reading back a backup volume as soon as it
finds such a zeroed record. But this also means that tar
never
reads in the file mark provided by the tape device. This has an effect
when extracting more than one volume from a tape cartridge: after
tar
has completed extracting the first one, one needs to use an
`mt -f /dev/tape fsf
' to skip to the next volume (where one has to
replace `/dev/tape
' by the tape device one actually uses).
Just to make it clear: this is totally unrelated to ftape but a
feature of tar
. The same applies to all kinds of tape devices
available for Linux.
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