[lug] restoring from tape drive

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 03:03:12PM -0600, KELLEY SCOTT T wrote:
>I am trying to restore some particular directories from a tape drive using
>the tar command but it is taking forever. I know there is a lot of data on

Yeah, that's about the size of it.  There's not really any facility for
doing a fast restore using tar -- it has to stream the entire file looking
for the data you want.  If you do the "v" option it will tell you when it's
recovered the files in question.  The one oddity is that if you don't
specify the file exactly as it appears in the "tar t" listing, it will
run through the tape and only then will you find it didn't recover anything.
A real bummer.

There's a program called "dds2tar", which works with dds2 tape drives
to do fast recovery, and it works very well.  Unless you use dds2tar to
create the archive though, you will have to run one "indexing" pass
(which will probably take a number of hours) then you can run a fast
retrieval.

Sean
-- 
 "Self-taught just means that you don't have to get rid of other people's
 prejudices as well as your own." -- Sean Reifschneider, 1997
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python