On Thursday 13 May 2010 15:34:04 Paul Davis wrote: > I assume (as I am not an expert in the area) that the difficulties in > overwriting blocks on a tape is due to the inaccuracies of the medium > when writing to the exact location? Or is this simply a matter that > neighboring data on the tape might be affected by the non-equal > treatment of the tape itself?
It is more a question of the second of the above. A tape is made to append to. You can read at random blocks, but you cannot reliably write random blocks, without damaging following blocks. > > If I were to migrate the tape, the suggested procedure would involve the > spooling of the entire ~650-700GB to a drive, selectively editing the > files, and then rewriting the lot to a new tape with the old label? Is > there any way to code this using the existing tools? Bacula will do tape to tape migration. For more on that, please see the bacula-users list. We only deal with development and possible bugs, and sometimes wierd technical questions :-) Kern > > > Hello, > > > > To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to selectively overwrite > > records in the middle of a tape. Doing so, will almost surely also > > destroy some data you wish to keep. > > > > You would be better off simply migrating all the jobs you want to keep > > then demagnetizing or erasing the old tape. > > > > Best regards, > > > > Kern > > Thank you, > Paul Davis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
