SUMMARY: Hitting the end of the tape

Igor Schein (igor@andrew.air-boston.com)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 17:41:51 -0500 (EST)

> Hi,
>
> I have EXABYTE 8700LT 8mm tape drive installed on Solaris 2.6 machine.
> I use /dev/rmt/1hn device. When I tar a huge filesystem on the tape
> using native Solaris tar(1), it write up to the end of the tape and then
> exists with error "tar: write error: unexpected EOF". I have the same
> drive installed on HPUX 9.x and IRIX 6.3, and it prompts me to insert a
> new tape when it hits EOT. On IRIX, I also use native tar.
>
> So I'm wondering, is it a tar issue or is it a tape drive issue?
>
> TIA and will summarize.
>
> Igor
>
>
>

Thanks to those who replied. The consensus is, that Solaris tar doesn't
support multiple volumes, and one needs to use GNU tar instead. Some
people suggested ufsdump as an alternative, but in my case I'm backing up
remote NFS-mounted volume, not local UFS filesystem. 1 person suggested
using bar, a supposedly standard Solaris command, but I didn't find it it
on either 2.5.1 or 2.6 system.

Thanks again

Igor