Does anyone have any experience with SATA tape drives and tar? I want to make sure I'll be able to use tar with a tape drive before I spend $800.

And what about mt?

Thanks.

I would discourage anyone from investing in a tape backup system. These days the price/performance ratio of tapes is less attractive than using external disks. Even ruggedness and longevity do not necessarily favor tapes.

I think that the lack of response to this question may be an indication that people are not investing in SATA tape drives.

I disagree with the previous response. There are advantages and disadvantages of both external and SATA systems. It just depends on what you're looking to do. You can use mt to control the tape drive operations. Here's an article that goes through the commands needed to control tape drives for backup purposes using tar and mt.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-t...command-howto/
Good luck.

Tape is great but the hardware is so expensive most home users never see it. I have used tape drives on several platforms and they are a great backup solution. But I agree that disks are getting cheaper and cheaper so it may not be worth it soon. Still I feel more comfortable with a tape than I do with backing up to a drive until drives get cheap enough to be able to buy dozens and reliable enough to bounce around in a truck and sit in a warehouse for 20 years and still come out working. Yes I have done that with tapes.

A good interim solution is probably a blue ray burner. You can backup up to 54G on one disc. If you use rsync and make copies of only what changed you have a a lot of storage there.

I'll side with jkieth.

The immediate answer to the original question is, yes, of course it should work. However, you have just told us the interface, not the tape drive. You also haven't said anything about your backup environment or needs.

There have been many arguments and discussions about tape versus disk over the last few years. Curtis Preston (see http://www.backupcentral.com) famously titled a presentation "Seriously, Tape-Only Backup Systems Are Dead" at the 2006 Lisa/Usenix Conference -- http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa06/tech (scan down the page for Curtis Preston). However, if you listen to his whole presentation, what he is really saying is that for large installations, disk-to-disk-to-tape is the only way to get the performance and features that are desired. He's not saying tape is dead.

There are many many different environments and configurations for backups over a wide range of scales. There's almost never just one right answer. I also seriously doubt you can infer that people aren't investing in sata tapes based on a one day response lag on the forum.

I'm sorry. I guess I wasn't specific enough. I only mentioned SATA because I've been working with SCSI tape drives for a long time. I'm also not choosing between tape and anything else, only SATA or SCSI tape. I want to try SATA and wanted to find out whether basic linux tools like mt and tar will work the same way with a SATA drive as they do with a SCSI drive.

Thanks for all responses.

They should work independently of the drivers, if that is your question. NIX has always been careful to isolate function in modules and it's unusual to find any app that goes so far as to have its own device drivers.

So it doesn't matter whether its /dev/sdc1 or /dev/st0? Are there tools to map sata devices to usual stX nodes?

Thanks.