At my new workplace, I am expected to backup older data (large image-files) to tape. As someone who as never used tapes, I have a few questions regarding them. It would be great if someone can point me to a guide on the web or answer them here.
Currently, I am able to query the tape drive using the command mt
. Along with this mt has options to move the tape head from one file boundary to another
mt -f /dev/st0 status
Moving the data seems straight forward using tar.
tar cvf /dev/st0 somedirectory/
The part that I am not able to understand is how do I query how much space is available on the tape volume? The tapes I am testing are HP LTO-5 Ultrium(1.5TB uncompressed).
Also, how does one create volumes that can span over multiple tapes? Say a folder of size 10TB?
Once this system is working, I intend to archive 10TB of data every six months on two different sets of tapes.