On Tuesday 30 December 2003 08:43, Kurt Yoder wrote:
>Gene Heskett said:

<snipped>

>> Its inconvienient for some, but infinitly safer for all this way.
>
>Couldn't "append to tape" be simulated? That is, rewind the tape and
>check the tape label as normal. Then copy all contents of the tape
>to the holding disk. Then use amdump to add to the holding disk.
>Then flush the holding disk back to tape. The drawback to this
>solution is that it would take quite a bit longer. However, there
>would be no risk of accidentally overwriting portions of the tape.
>
>I'm just asking in theory; I have no plans to implement anything
>like this at my site.

I suppose it could be done, but gawd, what a bunch of wheel spinning 
that would be.  In my case the 'mt -f /dev/ice seof' works like a 
charm.  But thats been amply proven to not work for some drives, so I 
haven't even considered mucking around in the sources.  Besides, with 
my teeny drive, I'm up to an 8 day dumpcycle as it is, with the 
average tape useage reported to be 95% or more.  If I had a 200Gig 
LTO or something instead of a 4gig DDS2, well...  But then I can't 
afford a tape for an LTO, so why should I dream :)

Andrews solution is that his holding disk is on a raid-5, so its not 
quite as large a problem if something gets a tummy ache.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.