
Chapter 34. Usage of floppy tape drives on Linux
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Chapter 34. Usage of floppy tape drives on Linux


Albrecht Gebhardt

Original text<albrecht.gebhardt@uni-klu.ac.at>

Stefan G. Weichinger

XML-conversion,Updates
AMANDA Core Team
<sgw@amanda.org>

Note

Refer to http://www.amanda.org/docs/zftape.html for the current version of this
document.
AMANDA now supports the ftape driver version 3.04d (see http://www-
math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/claus/ftape ). It adjusts the blocksize
automatically to 32k and supports QIC volume tables.
It uses only one open() call for writing backups to one tape, so the "busy"-
lamp of the drive will be on all the time. (With normal AMANDA code it would be
off in pauses between two files written to tape.)
For volume table support you have to get libvtblc first (available at ftp://
pc02-stat.sci.uni-klu.ac.at/pub/Linux/libvtblc.) This library contains the
functions and subroutines from the vtblc utility, distributed with ftape.
(Maybe this library will be part of a future ftape package).
You have to set the raw tape device for volume table operations, usually /dev/
rawft0, either via configure --with-ftape-rawdevice= or with rawtapedev in
amanda.conf (configure checks for /dev/rawft[0-3], to get a guess for this
value). Dont forget to make this device read/writeable for your backup user.
For compilation you need the header files from ftape 3.04d in your include
tree.
The volumetable of a tape "amlabeled" TEST-VOL2 with 4 backups on it would look
like (listed with vtblc utility from ftape):

  prompt: vtblc

   Nr  Id          Label                   Date           Start      End
  Space

    0 VTBL TEST-VOL2               23:08:06 03/15/98        3        4    0.00
  %
    1 VTBL gamma //beta/C 0        00:00:00 03/15/98        5      374    0.68
  %
    2 VTBL gamma sda2 0            00:00:00 03/15/98      375     1029    1.21
  %
    3 VTBL alpha sda2 0            00:00:00 03/15/98     1030     1906    1.62
  %
    4 VTBL alpha sda6 0            00:00:00 03/15/98     1907     8092   11.45
  %
    5 VTBL AMANDA Tape End         01:45:15 03/16/98     8093     8094    0.00
  %

With lvtblc, currently available with the libvtblc library, you can list the
complete label strings (44 characters, not only the first 22 characters as with
vtblc):


  prompt: lvtblc -l

   Nr  Id          Label                                         Date

    0 VTBL TEST-VOL2                                     23:08:06 03/15/98
    1 VTBL gamma //beta/C 0                              00:00:00 03/15/98
    2 VTBL gamma sda2 0                                  00:00:00 03/15/98
    3 VTBL alpha sda2 0                                  00:00:00 03/15/98
    4 VTBL alpha sda6 0                                  00:00:00 03/15/98
    5 VTBL AMANDA Tape End                               01:45:15 03/16/98

Note on datestamps: volume 0 (AMANDA label): reflects the time of starting the
backup volume i (backup files): AMANDA datestamps of the backup files last
volume (end marker) : reflects the time of finishing the backup
I tested this on a Linux machine (P90 / 96Mb RAM / 256 Mb swap) with two other
clients (Linux / WfW) using

* Linux Kernel 2.0.33,
* ftape 3.04d,
* AMANDA 2.4.0b6p4

with an internal Iomega Ditto 3200 (TR-3) drive attached to an Iomega Ditto
Dash controller (at 2000 Kbps). My tapetype follows:

  define tapetype DITTO-TR3 {
      comment "Iomega DITTO 3200 Travan 3 tape drives"
      length 1500 mbytes          #
      filemark 29 kbytes          # ???
      speed 256 kbytes            # = 2000 Kbit/s ?
  }
  	


Note

Filemarks are not written to the tape (they are written to the header segment
and use there 128 byte), so their size could even be 0. But a tape segment
takes at least 29 kb (+3 kb ecc-code = 32 kb), so in the worst case an eof will
waste 29 kb.
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