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8.6: Tape blocks

The first changes I made to ftape were to implement an emulation of tape blocks of a fixed length to allow support for the block seek commands MTFSR, MTBSR and MTSEEK (see MTIOCTOP). These commands allow for skipping of damaged tape sections and for fast (well, still slow enough) skipping inside a backup volume and are important for skipping bad spots on tape cartridges. The floppy tape segments are not suitable for this purpose because they have varying length due to bad sectors.

I regard a fixed block-size as a feature, but on the other hand there are some thing to take into account:


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