How long does it take if you dd 1GB of /dev/zero to the tape (Be sure to adjust your block sizes)?
doing dd if=/dev/zero of=dev/st0 bs=128k i get a segmentation fault, so I can not answer that at this time.
Overall, the $100 (or less) you spend to put in a backup staging disk will more than pay for itself by eliminating wear and tear on your DLT drive.
FYI: This concept is also called a D2D2T (Disk to Disk to Tape) backup strategy, or a mezzanine backup strategy. The more sophisticated versions keep several recent backups on disk and restores from those recent backups come in directly from disk.
dd is one of the truly basic linux/unix commands. Basically anybody doing sysadm should get familiar with it. Unfortunately it has a rather unique syntax.
Thanks greg for the info. Would you suggest any other software to use for the d2d backup part of the scheme then bru. I have not bought bru just checking out the demo version is all right now. I have a cd coming in the mail ca, there rep has been calling left an right since I downloaded a windows version hehehehe. I'm not stuck on bru just trying it out since it had a demo to try. I just need a good reliable backup scheme to use. I already have a spare 120 gig ide drive to use in the main system, an will drop i a spare in the testbench machine for testing tomorrow. I do like the ideal of the d2d2t scheme. Just hard to convince my boss of new ways of doing things at times. he is old an close to retiring. again thanks for your info an help. I have played with a 1 gig tar file an dd with setting bs=64, then bs=128k an still took 30 minutes to put it on the tape. It might be the old 3ware raid card I have in the system that is causing the slowdown, I using raid level 0 on this test machine. well back to some more reading an testing jack