Tony van der Hoff wrote:

I posted last week that my confusion had arisen out of the "skip=1", having
located the required archive. The need to rewind and skip 2 files in this
case could have been avoided at step 1 above. Now *that* would make a
difference.

Ah, there is the confusion!

The "skip=1" parameter of dd is not about skipping files, but skipping
blocks (of size bs=32k).
the "mt fsf 2" does the skipping of two files.

Each file on the amanda tapes is the (maybe compressed) tar/dump output
prepended with 32K bytes. The first 32 Kbytes contain the amanda
header for each file, describing the content.  To extract the bytes
for tar/dump, just drop the first 32Kbytes of the file.

--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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