Magnetic tape tools

[Bruce Dobrin <dobrin at imageworks dot com>]

I found a need to read Tar Archives from a LTO 4 tape and only had a Vista Box to do it.  After messing around with SFU, gnu-tar etc I installed Cygwin and As expected,  was able to mt to filemark 117 and begin extraction (/dev/nst0).  Which was better than I could do with any other tool,  the Problem is that it was excruciatingly slow.  It took over an hour to get to filemark 116 and all night to extract 6500 files.  Much slower than on My Linux boxes (  which are not an option in this case). I haven't had to deal with MT in a long time,  is there a way to speed this up?  Could I Might it be faster to dd the whole (TByte) tape and untar later?  Are there any other tools I should concider? I'm hoping someone has had to do this recently and knows the secret

Mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 116
Tar -xvb 1024 -f /dev/nst0

Thanks for your wisdom
Bruce D.



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