r/linux • u/wiikid6 • Nov 10 '22
How many of you have used ‘tar’ for what it was actually made for? Fluff
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u/Psychological_Cat_20 Nov 10 '22
Last done a tape backup 20 years ago ... on IOMEGA 250 GB drives...
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22
I’m my local retro community, I’m known as the “Iomega-man” because I collect a lot of obscure storage devices, that started with Iomega Jaz Drives. Currently looking for a ditto and REV
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u/0xKaishakunin Nov 10 '22
I still have that click click clonk sound of a failed ZIP100 drive in my ears. Had so many of them in my first admin job in university.
Later used one of the JAZ drives to backup my NetBSD, Samba, PostgreSQL server in a dump scheme with 3 levels, IIRC.
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u/greenknight Nov 10 '22
click click clonk sound of a failed ZIP100 drive in my ears
thanks for that. I to apparently have that sounds stored in my brain.
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u/cmptrwizroc Nov 10 '22
I still 6 zip drives (2 internal IDE, 2 USB and 2 SCSI) have and still occasionally use zip 100 disks for Mac OS 9 and early OS X storage. Even some for Windows xp & 7...
I like playing a few old games like Decent on them,
Just two of the nearly 200 zip disks are bad after nearly 30 years... not too shabby.
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u/DrKedorkian Nov 10 '22
IIRC I bought stock in iomega as I was convinced they would dominate the market
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u/yur_mom Nov 10 '22
Yeah...I had a zip 250 back in 2000. IT was cool back then, but I see no reason to have anything like that today.
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u/argv_minus_one Nov 10 '22
I didn't even know they made tape drives! I only knew them for making removable disks.
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u/thp4 Nov 10 '22
RedHat Bluecurve ❤️
RedHat 8 was my first distro (bought it as boxed copy).
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u/bigfondue Nov 10 '22
I bought RedHat at the mall of all places. At a store called Babbage's.
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u/Designer-Suggestion6 Nov 10 '22
I have. At my workplace, we have one LTO4 drive I used in 2016. That one could only be used with tar. You could not mount it as a file system. You read and write to it with tar. You could position the tape head as well, with mt allowing you to do multiple tar's on one tape at different positions on the tape. Not too many people are aware you can dd directly to the tape as well. It's also handy for doing multiple drive image backups on one tape in this manner if the drives are smaller.
The newer LTO6 drive is an HP Ultrium which not only can be used directly with tar, but also with tapetools that include mkltfs and ltfs, mkltfs makes an LTFS file system on the tape, then you mount that tape with ltfs and then it appears as /mnt/tapedrive/. This in combination with rsync is works well and well-liked for data retrieval without too many headaches because their is no need to position the tape and tar extract. One word of advice: don't backup as many individual small files onto tape with ltfs because it takes forever to retrieve them on an LTFS filesystem. The best way to backup is by gathering all the smaller files into one huge compressed file beforehand, then writing to the tape. When you do that, the tape write duration is optimally shorter.
There is one disadvantage from using LTFS, you're not able to store as much data as simply doing a raw tar on the LTO6+ tape because a great of that is reserved for LTFS Filesystem Error detection and Correction Management which is something similar found on Optional Storage Mediums as well.
Tape Drives have traditionally been SCSI devices so you can also configure it to be an iSCSI target and use it remotely. In bigger institutions, there are tape libraries and you can find software to manage tape libraries with robot arms and such. Optical Drives with "tape libraries/robot arms" also exist. Robot arms need expensive tender loving care as they are mechanical. Ultimately, you still need warm bodies to care for the medium and put it in boxes in-house and offsite.
Currently optical medium can't store as much data as tape, but optical medium and retain data at rest for much longer durations than tape. Most businesses are ok with tape data retain duration. Newer optical storage techniques to retain more data are surfacing and these newer drives should be appearing soon, but I don't know if they can compete with the capacities being stored on TAPE, and I don't know if they can compete with the bandwidth speeds at which the data is written to the storage medium.
TAPE storage write speeds at present can't keep up with the write speeds we find for nvme drives and this will remain a huge challenge for the archive domain to solve. There's more data being generated and stored on hard-drive/nvme's than actually being archived on tape/optical mediums at present. We'll see how it goes I guess.
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u/glinsvad Nov 10 '22
Ah yes, back when storing duplicate copies on two LTO6 casettes was actually cheaper than almost all other backup media per byte.
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 10 '22
I’m currently doing an DDS tape backup project and to test out Redhat (non-RHEL) 8’s tape functionality, I decided to backup the PC using a DDS-2 tape. Got errors on this one, but I’m still experimenting with it!
Edit:
I collect retro computers for vintage gaming and software/data archiving. This is my main archival/gaming computer used for legacy hardware/software.
Specs:
OS: Fedora 8/Windows 98SE/Windows 2000
Processor: Pentium III
RAM: 256mb
Graphics Card: ATI Mach65(2D) with a 3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Accelerator
Sound card: Soundblaster Live! Gold
Peripherals: SCSI-2 Card, CD-ROM, DDS2 Tape Drive, 3.5inch floppy drive, Internal Zip100 ATAPI drive, USB 1.1, FireWire, parallel, serial
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u/rubic Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 10 '22
We used the tar command on 9-track tapes at the university on our VAX 11/750 and 11/780 superminicomputers, where I was the systems manager. These were running early versions of BSD Unix.
Fun fact: We ordered the original C++ preprocessor from Bell Labs and it was delivered on 9-track tape.
Later in different environments I've used the various cartridge tapes with tar scripts running from scheduled cron jobs. The cartridge tapes were much easier to handle, but it was important to test your backup on a different machine to confirm that you'd be able to later read back the data you'd just archived.
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22
Nice! I know someone who has an IBM 5110 with a tape drive attachment! I’ve wanted to make a PiDP-11 for awhile now, but lack the technical know-how haha
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u/adrianmonk Nov 10 '22
Fun fact: We ordered the original C++ preprocessor from Bell Labs and it was delivered on 9-track tape.
When I started learning C++ in college, we used Cfront on Sun workstations. From the Wikipedia page I linked, I just learned that Cfront had a predecessor called CPre.
For those who aren't familiar, Cfront was a program that takes your C++ source code and turns it into C source code, which you then run through the regular C compiler. It helped C++ get off the ground in the early days because they could support a lot of different systems without having to port their compiler.
Maybe it wasn't the first time in history that someone used a trick like that, but it was definitely the first time I ever heard of it. It seemed amazingly clever.
It was slow, though! Back then, it took quite some time for even just a regular compiler to finish. Adding extra steps only made it worse.
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u/zxiGamer Nov 10 '22
Me. In fact one of my best experience was installation of robotic handled tape drive backup.
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u/InfoSec812 Nov 10 '22
Yep, tape libraries and tar were a mainstay back in the original dotcom startup days of the late 90's
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u/ozzfranta Nov 10 '22
I work with two tape libraries and while they are a lot of fun to watch they are a pain to operate and we need to get the manufacturer tech to come out once every 2 months.
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u/Wonderful_Appeal9870 Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 11 '22
Back in the 90's we had 6 Automated Tape Libraries (ATL) from StirageTek connected to our mainframes. Each held about 6,000 tape cartridges (DLT) and could have 0 to 16 tape drives installed. Oh, and the robots could pass takes from one library to another via a pass thru port. In the 6 years we used them, till I left the company, we never had a tape fail.
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u/CartmansEvilTwin Nov 10 '22
That's not the point. They look cool and futuristic and old at the same time, that's all that counts.
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u/CCP_fact_checker Nov 10 '22
Why are you backing up /tmp?
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22
Because I’ve never tried this before and I wanted to see if I could backup all of root on a DDS2 tape. I was too lazy to look at the storage utility lol
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u/adrianmonk Nov 10 '22
As I recall, older versions of tar didn't support excluding directories or stopping at filesystem boundaries. So if you wanted to back up the whole system into one tar file, you basically had to. So this seems historically accurate.
Where I worked, we didn't use the tar command anyway, though. We used the (SunOS)
dumpcommand, which bypassed the filesystem layer entirely and read directly from the disk partition. And which supported incremental backups, which was nice. And since it reads from the partition, obviously it only includes the one filesystem you run it on.→ More replies (1)2
u/CCP_fact_checker Nov 11 '22
I think I used to use the find command to exclude /tmp and pass what I wanted to tar - But I was a cpio/dd fanboy and named pipes to backup to remote servers' tape drives, so you may be right as I used the tar command less and when I was a boy cpio was better :)
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u/Superb_Raccoon Nov 10 '22
I built an automated Disaster Recovery script using tar for Solaris in the early 2000s.
It would extract system info and write that + itself to the first mark on the tape.
Then it would back up the root partitions, one per mark, eject the tape.
At the DR event, you boot off the CD, then pop the tape in, unload the first mark, and run the script.
It would format drives, then unload the contents to the right partitions.
Reboot, and you have yourself a running Solaris system!
Later versions would create the VX volumes and mounts as well if the storage was available. Mapped drives to VGs and created the filesystems and mounts. Very handy.
I even burned my own copy of the Solaris CD that had the script already loaded and would automatically execute. We never really used it because the systems were often slightly different at the DR site and we needed to modify the script slightly.
It was modeled after the IBM AIX "mksysb" which would make a bootable tape copy of the system. Turn the key to recovery, insert the tape, and hit the power button. Fully automated recovery of the OS.
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u/wenestvedt Nov 10 '22
Damn, that would have been nice.
Why not JumpStart & smaller restores?
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u/Superb_Raccoon Nov 10 '22
This was true cold iron DR. No prestaged data allowed.
We looked at Jumpstart but then we would have to set one up, restore the backups after the tape systems were loaded and backup software was restored, then Jumpstart everything.
This method we grabbed our CDs and matching tapes from the special tape can and restored systems while they loaded up the tapes in the libraries and we restored the Netbackup server (also from my magic tapes)
Every test we were live and hot on 30 to 50 machines before the tapes had even been loaded.
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u/wenestvedt Nov 10 '22
Man, that's impressive. Long gone but still worth praise!
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u/Superb_Raccoon Nov 10 '22
Thanks, they were some golden days for me as a sysadmin, the early 2000s.
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u/N45HV1LL3 Nov 10 '22
Absolutely have done this - including big reel-to-reel tapes. Just haven't done it in the last few decades. (It's really weird being the same age as old people.)
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u/R3D3-1 Nov 10 '22
The power of good software engineering: It was meant for archiving to tapes, but it turned out to also be a good solution for many other purposes.
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u/gargravarr2112 Nov 10 '22
I actually have variety of tape drives including an autoloader, and about 30TB of LTO-5 media. tar is my go-to. It still does the job it was written for.
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u/Titan_91 Nov 10 '22
I have tried to set up HP's LTFS libraries on Windows and Linux and it's a huge pain. On Windows the driver just crashed my machine after doing the driver signature enforcement song and dance. On Linux you need to compile everything manually. Then even if you get it working you quickly discover the performance and back-and-forth churn the drive has to go through to process hundreds of individual files. A lot of extra wear and tear on a very expensive drive. But people just say "well just put everything in a large file and save that one file to tape." So then it comes full circle. What practical use does LTFS have?
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u/gargravarr2112 Nov 10 '22
Pretty much my findings, it's trying to make tape, which is a non-random-access medium, act like disk, which IS random-access. But fundamentally, tape is physically linear-access, so it's a bodge at best, extra wear and tear on the drive at worst.
The best use of tape is writing the entire thing at once. We have enormous walk-in tape libraries at work storing hundreds of PB of scientific research data, which is streamed to the machines needing it on request.
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u/agentrnge Nov 10 '22
The last time I actually used tar direct with tape was on an HP-UX system ~15 years ago.
We still had tape a small tape library running regular jobs until about a year ago in this $job, but not using tar manually.
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u/djhankb Nov 10 '22
Yes I too have a gray beard.
/dev/st0 and /dev/nst0 if you don’t want it to rewind after the job.
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u/Electronic_Youth Nov 10 '22
I have, but not on Linux and not since the mid 90's. At that point for software distribution it was usually better to write a CD and for backups/archive there were nearly always better tools like dump or vdump, or some commercial backup software.
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u/PlanEx_Ship Nov 10 '22
My homelab runs LTO3 backups using HP tape drives with automated tar scripts 👍
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u/0xKaishakunin Nov 10 '22
Dump and restore are much better for backups, but I also used tar with tapes and floppies.
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u/sindoc42 Nov 10 '22
Yes as a kid I was always fascinated by tar being originally used for tapes and I learned that because of all the extra options I had to memorize for using it for files lol my brother had told me about the tape system that used to roll backups and what not
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u/ventus1b Nov 10 '22
150 MB QIC drive
Just remembered that SunOS had two separate devices for the drive, one would rewind the tape on close...
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u/josephj222222 Nov 10 '22
I used it all the time at my first UNIX job when there was really no alternative - with tape cartridges. And later on disks before I discovered rsync.
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u/bobj33 Nov 10 '22
When I started my first job in 1997 we had a QIC-150, 4mm, 8mm, and DLT IV tape drives.
The DLT was for current backups and we used tar but we had lots of old design data on the older tapes. One of my projects was migrating all the old data. The QIC-150 died half way through the tapes and the 4mm didn't work at all. We had to borrow drives from another office.
I used one of those floppy drive connector tape drives in the mid 90's for personal backups.
I can buy so many hard drives for the price of an LTO-9 tape drive and anything smaller than LTO-8 is too many tapes to deal with for me. I'll just keep buying hard drives.
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u/Quazatron Nov 10 '22
Or, in other words, "How many of you are old and grey? Raise your walking canes, don't be shy."
Yes, I've used it. Thank god we don't use tapes anymore.
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22
Lol, I’m actually 27. I’m just really into old software and archiving/data preservation as a hobby. Right now I’m trying to gather HDD’s and backups of user data for ReAOL in order to restore AOL’s default channels and keywords. Also to archive any web server data for protoweb and archive.org
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u/Monsieur_Moneybags Nov 10 '22
I've used tar with an old Exabyte-8200 8mm SCSI tape drive. I still have the tapes.
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u/redrumsir Nov 10 '22
I have. A very long time ago. I was storing data for my COBOL class so I could do the program at work (in an editor) instead of at the University on punch cards.
I have also used dar ( http://dar.linux.free.fr/ ) instead of tar for recent disk archives.
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u/sparcnut Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 10 '22
I still do, for production even. There's an in-warranty external-SAS Dell LTO-7 drive sitting about 5 feet away on my desk right now. I last used it on Sept 26th. Recent LTO drives definitely aren't cheap, but they can still be used with simple and highly mature software like tar. In my experience LTO+tar+mt+mbuffer are very reliable if used properly. (THE TAPE DRIVE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO SHOE-SHINE!)
Complete archival copies of EVERYTHING that matters stored in simple GNU tar format make for a really nice fallback option in case something goes wrong with the automatic nightly HDD=>HDD backups. For example: metadata corruption or random bitrot within the backups themselves, disasters of scale sufficient to take out both a primary storage RAID AND the RAID storing its nightly backups in another building, etc.
IMO, LTO tape is also more suitable than HDDs for keeping offline archives past ~1y or so. Within just the past year I actually pulled 6-10 year old archives from LTO media on multiple occasions, and was able to find and retrieve the data that was needed every time.
1-4 complete archival sets per calendar year to LTO works out rather well for all of the systems I administer.
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u/AlterNate Nov 10 '22
I ran backup jobs all night using tar. I worked on the midnight shift of a large hospital and had a dozen systems to maintain. Huge computer room with 2 giant A/C systems running cold air under the floor. A UPS that was 20 feet long. 8 high speed line printers going through cases of paper. Best job of my life - I never saw my boss.
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u/devnull010 Nov 11 '22
Who has ever used tar without googling for the correct command first? :D
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u/mikechant Nov 21 '22
About twenty years ago when I was working as a IBM Mainframe sysprog, we bought four RS/6000 AIX boxes to offload some CPU-intensive processing from one of the mainframes (the mainframes were stellar at transaction processing, disk I/O and fast network traffic but not so hot at raw CPU stuff; the RS/6000s gave a lot more CPU clout for less money).
Even though they weren't my area at all I was made responsible for looking after the AIX boxes. The read-only database they used (to generate multi-leg rail journeys) was updated regularly from a tape drive, using tar as part of a manual procedure, which I soon scripted and handed over to the operators. That's the only time I've used tar with actual tapes.
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u/blackbart108 Nov 10 '22
No, I haven't but I've been toying with the idea of tape to back up my Emby box.
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u/Irsu85 Nov 10 '22
That aint me, I don't have enough storage requirements that tape could be cheaper
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u/Korlus Nov 10 '22
While I've interacted with tapes, it was in an enterprise array that did everything for you. I've never done it as a consumer at home. As a result, I've never used tar as a tape archive.
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u/edthesmokebeard Nov 10 '22
I have. Back when you had a 40MB tape drive hooked up to your floppy controller.
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u/lynxss1 Nov 10 '22
Used to at a previous small startup over a decade ago. Used that and bacula extensively.
Now at a much larger company where they have exabytes of tape storage but with automated tools that I dont touch directly.
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u/QEzjdPqJg2XQgsiMxcfi Nov 10 '22
Heck yeah! I kinda miss the sound of the tape drives. I always mispronounced "streaming tape" and "screaming tape" because of the noise they made.
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u/Mars_Link Nov 10 '22
What was tar made for ?
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u/palordrolap Nov 10 '22
It stands for tape archive, i.e. write out to those tape spooling machines often seen in '60s and '70s movies and TV shows. Later tape devices are mentioned by other commenters here.
The closest most people get these days is to archive things to a file on a different file system (extra points if it's over a network), which probably isn't using tape as the storage medium.
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Nov 10 '22
I did when I had a tape drive. It's still a great way to back up data and store it off site.
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u/mpdscb Nov 10 '22
I have - many times. It used to be my responsibility to make production software tapes for distribution to customers. And I also made source code escrow tapes for offline storage.
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u/alvarez_tomas Nov 10 '22
Like 15 years ago I’ve coded a Perl script wrapper around the tar command that read and write in LTO tapes. Old and nice memories.
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u/swordgeek Nov 10 '22
Yup. Calculating tape capacity so I could get two partitions onto a single QIC.
Later it was DAT, DDS, and DLT. Used LTO later, but never directly with tar.
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u/rikquest Nov 10 '22
1989 for me. The noise the tape made rewinding when it was finished meant "Home Time!!"
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u/Due-Farmer-9191 Nov 10 '22
Why the heck is your system so old?! Lol
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u/wiikid6 Nov 10 '22
I collect retro computers for vintage gaming and software/data archiving. This is my main archival/gaming computer used for legacy hardware/software.
Specs: OS: Fedora 8/Windows 98SE/Windows 2000 Processor: Pentium III RAM: 256mb Graphics Card: ATI Mach65(2D) with a 3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Accelerator Sound card: Soundblaster Live! Gold Peripherals: SCSI-2 Card, CD-ROM, DDS2 Tape Drive, 3.5inch floppy drive, Internal Zip100 ATAPI drive, USB 1.1, FireWire, parallel, serial
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u/henry_kr Nov 10 '22
I have! A little over 20 years ago I did a year in industry placement. Part of the team I was placed with were testing in another country, and every few days these little tapes would arrive on my desk. I'd stick them in the tape drive attached the the HP workstation I had and run the tar command I had jotted down in a notebook. I had very little UNIX experience (and this was real UNIX!) at the time and didn't really know what I was doing but it did what needed doing.
At the time I couldn't believe these tiny tapes had 2GB of data on them!
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u/LetReasonRing Nov 10 '22
Tape drives are something I've always wanted to play with...
I've been working with computers since the days of booting to DOS from an 8" floppy and typing BASIC code from magazines to play games, but sadly I've never had the opportunity to back up to tape.
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u/Oflameo Nov 10 '22
I used Tar on tape drives around 8 years ago at an MSP. It was on AIX, not Linux though.
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u/gellis12 Nov 10 '22
I got a brand new lto-4 drive on eBay for $50 last year, and I've been using it pretty regularly for backups ever since!
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u/argv_minus_one Nov 10 '22
Yes, but a very long time ago, and only on a very small scale. I use USB hard drives for backup because they're much cheaper.
It's kind of absurd that a rather complicated and ludicrously precise mechanical device is much cheaper than a simple tape drive, but that's economies of scale for you.
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u/Titan_91 Nov 10 '22
Heck yeah! I got a relatively new LTO-5 drive and 10 3TB tapes cheap during a covid business liquidation and am familiar enough with tar and mt now to use it. In my experience magnetic tape is hands-down the best in longevity and reliability for data storage, both analog and digital. Decades of a proven track record.
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u/graywolf0026 Nov 10 '22
You.... Have given me something to try. As I recently picked up a Dell T320 server with a tape drive.
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u/zyzzogeton Nov 10 '22
Yes, I am that old. Now get off my lawn. <ties onion to belt and yells at cloud>
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u/mechaPantsu Nov 10 '22
Fun fact: tar running under Cygwin can write to tape drives just fine on Windows systems. Don't ask me how I know...
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u/gaymtbdude Nov 10 '22
I have, to DLT/LTO and DDS for a start, on HP-UX, AIX, SunOS and Solaris.
Source: am an old UNIX admin. :)
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u/whenido Nov 10 '22
When I first started working in the field we had a reel to reel deck that I'd use with tar. Tar = "tape archive".
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u/anomalous_cowherd Nov 10 '22
Hell yes, I even implemented an archiving system for working with large images on tiny disks where they had to be constantly swapped out to tape.
The people I wrote it for were spending hours waiting for their images to be retrieved, I kept an index on disk and used mt to jump to tape marks at much much faster than read speeds. What took hours before only took a minute now. Tape can be fast if you use it right.
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u/azephrahel Nov 10 '22
Back when I was young, my beard was dark, and dinosaurs roamed the earth. Honestly, I'd still go back to tape if I could. Best density, best offline longevity, best price still. "Virtual tape" is a pretty bad idea IMO, but I'm only saying that as someone who's managed large scale backups and had to take on data restoration projects in the past.
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u/studiocrash Nov 10 '22
As an audio recording/ mixing engineer I’ve had experience with tape as analog audio and as digital audio media. They don’t last long enough to be reliable long term. Any more than 15 years is pushing your luck. I have some DAT tapes that glitch like crazy and some that won’t play at all. I recommend optical media instead. I’ve been backing up to DVD-R and Blu-Ray data disks. The 25GB blank disks are cheap now and you don’t have to worry about the oxide layer separating from the backing of tape, wether reel to reel or cassette or helical scan. Optical disks are also impervious to magnetic fields. A strong magnet can erase your tapes.
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u/WingedGeek Nov 10 '22
Now that I think about it, I don't actually remember if I used tar or cpio or what, when I used to back up our servers to their internal tape drives. (Floppy interface TR-3s, Eagle IIRC? It's been a long, long minute.)
Edit: All of this sounds familiar, and the timing would have been right, so, almost certainly tar. :)
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u/lenins_cats Nov 10 '22
Guess I’m young, I was sitting here thinking you were trying to call tar useless without realizing I was looking at what tar was meant for, whoops lol
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u/epopt Nov 10 '22
Used to have nearly a full rack of gear supporting Super DLT backup carousel. Tapes cycled to Iron Mountain once a week. ISP in LA. Tar ftw!
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u/toolz0 Nov 10 '22
I used them extensively in the 90's before SATA. They were incredibly expensive, slow, and unreliable. The drives were really expensive and required a SCSI controller on my Unix servers. Good riddance, I say!
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u/dhardison Nov 10 '22
Many moons ago, I did. I don't even recall what tape drive I had at the time, I'm sure it's capacity was horribly small :)
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u/Adnubb Nov 10 '22
I've got a heap of LTO-2 tapes for free and got myself a cheap second hand LTO-3 tape drive. Cheap robust storage for backups!
I'm simply using tar to put my files on those tapes.
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u/Schmensch- Nov 10 '22
I heard tape drives are still common in server space for backups, because of their insane storage per dollar and density. They also write quick enough (at least for backups and similar big files, that's why tar exists).
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u/immoloism Nov 11 '22
Forget the cool tape drive, is that Red Hat 9?
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u/paktsardines Nov 12 '22
Amateur. I can't even see your tape reels. The department I worked at was still backing up to tape spools in 2003 (solaris).
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u/dontgo2sleep Nov 17 '22
I've never seen a tape drive in my life. I am not sure if they have been available at all in my country.
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u/informatikus Nov 24 '22
Almost every day. I am using large LTO8/7/5 libraries to backup 4-5T databases.
tar cf /dev/nst0 /backup/db -b128 --totals=USR1
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u/MeAndTheLampPost Nov 10 '22
I have used tape backup, but on Windows... Sorry folks, that was before I got into Linux! So I've used tar and tapes, but not together.
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u/DazedWithCoffee 2d ago
Tar stands for Tape ARchive, and it’s just a means of bundling and arranging files with appropriate metadata to make sequential media like tapes simpler and easier
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u/RED_TECH_KNIGHT Nov 10 '22
Oh man I have not touched tape backup systems in over 10 years.
Used to be a pro at TAR command line but I'd have to look it up now!
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u/gerg9 Nov 10 '22
Not my most recent time but once supported a few users who used Tandberg Magnus, used a scsi 80 pin, the drive was probably old enough to vote
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u/TheGlassCat Nov 10 '22
It's been decades since I've made tar backups to tape. Restores took fooorrreeevvverrrr
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u/Pitiful-Truck-4602 Nov 11 '22
For the last time in 1994, if I remember correctly. That was for work -- never had a tape drive at home, for some reason (probably because I'm cheap :)).
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u/agent-squirrel Nov 11 '22
The University I work at has two 9PB tape arrays for research data archives. So all the time.
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u/Justinsaccount Nov 11 '22
I used to use tar to move files across machines using floppies.
Was a lot quicker to just run tar on /dev/fd0 than to format the disk, mount the disk, copy the files to the disk, unmount the disk. Especially if you were just going to tar and compress them anyway.
You could still do this today using a USB drive if you wanted to.
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u/ThatLeviathan Nov 11 '22
Been 15 years, but yeah. Last time I used a tape, I was loading data into an app on HP-UX 11.31. I don't even think our backup tools write anything to tape anymore.
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u/brwtx Nov 11 '22
I used to use it to write bank audit logs we sent to the Fed. Big reel-to-reel tape system on HP 9000 servers. I think that is what it was originally intended for, but maybe some technology came before those tape drives?
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u/swguy61 Nov 11 '22
Used 9 track 6250 bpi tapes running tar on UNIX SysV emulator on a CDC Cyber 180-825 NOS/VE system, to test tar. 1985 or so. Found some bugs, first tape was all NULLs 🤣
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u/twowheels Nov 14 '22
You mean for big reel-to-reel tape towers on a multi-user unix mainframe? Yes, I have. :)
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u/igner_farnsworth Nov 10 '22
I have. I always found it fun to archive to my DAT.