On Thursday 06 February 2003 15:06, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Thursday 06 February 2003 5:13 am, Paul Uiterlinden wrote:
Have you ever looked at `dds2tar'? It is included in SuSE and it allows you to restore a single file from tape by using the fast seek command of DAT tape drives. It works great for me (HP35470A DDS-1 drive); I don't know wheter it'll work for you (DDS-4).
Paul.
In order to use QFA (quick file access) of a DDS drive, someone has to know the 'location' of the file on tape. Where does dds2tar get this info?
You patch and compile tar so that it will take an extra argument, telling tar to create a file containing filenames and blocknumbers. There is also a possibility of creating this index file afterwards (with dds2index), but once you have patched tar you'll never need that. It is this index file that dds2tar uses to see where it has to seek to. This is great if you want to restore a few files. For a complete restore you don't need the index file. You can use an unpatched version of tar for that. This allows you to restore the complete system just using the SuSE boot CD (been there, done that). I don't think the patch for tar is included in the SuSE rpms. The URL mentioned in /usr/share/doc/packages/dds2tar/README is remarkably out of date. The URL that I know of where you can find the complete tar-ball, including the patch, is: http://www.eulesoft.de/ Paul.