On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
* Maarten van den Berg wrote on Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 18:31 +0200:
How can you enable the hardware compression? I only have a logical device which I use with the -f flag of tar program.
mt -f /dev/nst0 datcompression 2
I don't think that this is a nice idea always. AFAIK it may happen that you cannot read back the tape data on a different drive (maybe if it's newer or from a different vendor). Once we had a old DAT drive that were out of order. Other drives were not able to restore the backup tape. Thank god we had aother such old model...
I agree completely. Hardwarecompression is probably vendor specific, so potentially hasardous. Sorry I forgot to mention that, thanks. Then again, chances are you will not be able to read an old tape on a new device, period. With or without compression. Tapes tend to deteriorate quite fast anyhow, especially DAT. But I fear we're quite OT now... Maarten