Most of my confusion regarding tape drives/tapes and how to most properly use them comes from years of using tapes in the dos/windows environment. Apparently, the floppy tape portions of the kernel don't apply to me, which would make sense as my tape drive is a SCSI-2 Connor CTMS 3200 Rev 7.15. I use QIC-WIDE 3080 tapes, which are supposed to support 2 gigabytes native/4 gigabytes with compression. I've got enough of these things, that I'm just as happy to not use compression if I don't have to. Having said that, here's my questions: 1. Do I need to format these tapes prior to writing to them? If so, what utility should I use to do this? This stems from having discovered "ftformat" (floppy tape format) for QIC-80 based tapes. I'm assuming if one type of tape needs formatting, so do others. 2. Has anyone else had any experience with this type of drive and tape combination? If so, could you relate your thoughts as to reliability, performance, etc... Anecdotes about problems and any solutions you discovered are most welcome. 3. Other than tar, dump, and the 3rd party BRU, can anyone recommend a feature-packed backup program? Command line or X based are fine, I'm willing to experiment with either. Right now I'm giving preference to command line, as the file server I have the tape drive on doesn't have X installed on it, and even if it did, I haven't figured out how to get an X session on my workstation to control an X session on my file server (yet). But that's another post to come later. I was using BRU a few weeks back, and trying to do a full backup of approximately 40 gigs of data on the file server (Backup / and everything below). The problem I experienced was I got to tape 7, and got the following error message: "/dev/tape: Input/output error" Needless to say, after backing up most of the day, I was a bit disgusted. Either I made a mistake and had actually backed up on 7 tapes and forgot to switch to tape 8, or something really did go wrong with tape 7. The error is the same error I'll get if I try to execute "/usr/bin/mt -f /dev/tape erase" after executing "/usr/bin/mt -f /dev/tape offline", without switching tapes, so maybe I did forget to switch tapes. *sigh* That'll teach me to not keep a running written log as I do the backup. Anyway, I'm rambling. Input welcome. :-) Argentium -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/