I would like to backup a NAS to a series of LT02 tapes, (200 gigs uncompressed, 400gigs compressed.) There are about 700 gigs of data to back up. I initially tried cpio, first trying to set hardware compression with an mt -f /dev/nst0 compression and then invoking cpio with:
find . -depth -print | cpio -ocBv 2>/root/file_backup > /dev/nst0. It does not appear the compression was set, as four tapes were needed. When I tried:

find . -print -depth -mount | cpio -oCvB 2> /root/file_backup | gzip -c > /dev/nst0 which did compress the backup as expected but at the end of the tape I was not prompted to mount a second tape.

Tar with compression works fine, but you cannot use the multi-tape option with compression. Does someone have and alternate suggestion?

dump might be one to try.

There is no question that dump is a wonderful and reliable backup piece of software, but it doesn't match the requirements of the job. I've used it for years on my FreeBSD machines. Thanks, though for the suggestion.

Amanda?

Amanda almost does the trick, though I admit I haven't used it in awhile. I will be moving to Bacula in awhile that I've always considered an enterprise level piece of software. I was just trying to come up with a simple solution till I get Bacula configured.

Thanks again for your suggestions.