On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 7:12 AM, Emmanuel Kasper
<emmanuel.kasper AT openforce DOT com> wrote:
> Is it possible to use something a hard drive cartridge like this
> http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_rd1000?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
> as a "real" tape device in Amanda ? ( Not vtape )
> I was wondering if there are physical properties of a hard drive which
> prevent it from being used like a tape.

Tapes are linear access, character devices, with peculiar semantics
for distinguishing files, etc.  Hard disks, on the other hand, are
block devices and usually expose a filesystem interface, on top of
which Amanda *emulates* tape semantics.

So the supported way to treat a hard disk as a tape is exactly the vfs
device driver (vtape).  There are certainly other ways to do it (write
a new kernel device driver or write a new Amanda device driver that
does something different from the vfs device driver), but I don't see
any benefit.

Dustin