Okay so we found the tape drive mapping. As you say, now it's just a matter of figuring out what you want to use for backup software. I can tell you what I was doing before I switched to external hard disks.
I created files that were the same size as the tapes, in in blocks. Then I mounted them through the loop devices using encryption. Then I formatted them and did a backup into them. Then I would unmount them and use dd to copy the encrypted files to tapes. That way the data on the tapes is encrypted. I believe that there is an easier way. I know that the tar command has an option to use an external program to compress the tar archive. I was thinking that instead of an external compression program I could call gpg to encrypt the tar archive as the backup was being created. One step encrypted archives. Much neater. I never tested it though.
Here is an example of how I was using dd to copy the encrypted files to tape. Maybe it might give you an idea.
Code:
root> cat dd2tape01.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo Retensioning tape.
mt -f /dev/ht0 retension
echo Erasing tape.
mt -f /dev/ht0 erase
echo Rewinding tape.
mt -f /dev/ht0 rewind
echo Starting tape dump of tape01.enc at `date +"%d %b %Y %r"`.
time \
dd if=/home/bkp/tape01.enc of=/dev/nht0 bs=10240 conv=notrunc,noerror
sync
echo Rewinding tape.
mt -f /dev/ht0 rewind
echo The tape dump has completed.
echo
exit
You'll notice that I actually backed up to device /dev/nht0. That is the same as /dev/ht0 except that /dev/nht0 won't automatically rewind. You have to give it the rewind command to get the tape to rewind when you use /dev/nht0. The "n" stands for "no automatic rewind". I had that in there because I was thinking about adding a block of data after the tar file to store the log file. Obviously I didn't implement it.
