Hello --

I am going through our tapes to extract data from several years ago. At that time we used a mini-computer running the HP-UX 11.00 operating system. Archives were done periodically to DLT and SDLT tapes.

The system in question has since been decommissioned, and I have been tasked with extracting the data from the tapes. The system that I am using to extract the data is an Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS server running as a virtual machine. To determine what is on a given tape, the following command is run:

The output that is shown on screen is the following:

As far as I know, gnu tar was used in these backups, but it is also possible the HP-UX specific tar utility was used for these operations.

Is there a specific command argument or option that I can use to successfully extract the data? If not, what are my options? Thanks.

Without knowing what was used, there's not much to suggest. You can try tar first, but CPIO could have also been used on HP/UX. Without knowing, it's almost impossible to guess, you're just going to have to try the different utilities, or ask whoever created the tape what they used. Did you try to redirect the tape command to a file to see what you got?

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Recommend you make a tar file, not a compressed one, just a tar file, and look at it.

Not too complicated, it is pure concatenation with a minor amount of added extra information.

Perhaps whatever lay on these tapes is merely that. I would believe that tar should also just be capable of extracting the information.

Another test would be to see if you can see files on that device and copy them over somewhere, or use the dd command to get an image of what's on the tape drive and then try to extract the data from the image file.

Hello --

Thank-you both for responding to my posting. I went with the suggestion of outputting the tar -tvf /dev/st2 command to a file, and the contents of the file listed the data.
Following that, I ran the command listed below:

The data was extracted to the default directory.