From: a0356514@let.rug.nl (H.H. Bergman) Subject: Re: Colorado tape drives. Compatibility? Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1992 13:33:19 GMT
In article <=f-l21g.james@netcom.com> james@netcom.com (James L. Paul) writes:
>I've been considering a tape drive for basic backups. The cheapest units
>I'm aware of are the Colorado 120 and 250 MB units. I'm not sure what the
>interface for these things are, but saw it implied in one ad that they
>use a floppy controller.
>
You need a special driver for those 'floppy-tape-drives'. I am working on
a driver for QIC-02 drives [bete test version available from banjo], but it
won't work with Colorado drives, or any QIC-40/80 drives because the interface
is totally different. A few months ago, there were some people in comp.os.minix
[remember Minix? ;-)] working on writing a driver. They appeared to have
sufficient info to do it, but I have no idea how far they got.
There seem to be a lot of people interested in a driver for QIC-40/80 tape
drives. [I got far more mail about that than about QIC-02, even though
I mentioned my driver was for QIC-02 only, not for QIC-40/80!]
Anybody working on a QIC-40/80 driver for Linux?
Note: there is a mailing list for tapes. [join by sending mail to
linux-activists-requests@niksula.hut.fi with x-mn-admin: join TAPE in the
headers or as the first line in the message body]
[For more info on mailing lists channels in general you could contact arl]
>
>Since the current filesystem size is limited to 64MB, is there a
>advantage to getting a 120 MB tape instead of a 250 MB? Can I put more
>that one tar to the tape from Linux? Basically, I'd like to hear any
>tips or caveats regarding using these cheap tape drives with Linux.
>
In the (hopefully near) future, there will be larger filesystems.
While there's no driver for those cheap floppy-tapes you could tar your
linux stuff up and mcopy it to a MesSyDOS partition and do a backup
from that the usual way.
>
>--
>James L. Paul
>
>Internet: netcom!james@apple.com | AppleLink: D1231 | CompuServe: 72767,3436
-Hennus Bergman
a0356514@gufalet.let.rug.nl [until July 3, 1992]
csg279@wing2.cs.rug.nl [keep trying 'till it doesn't bounce :-(]