On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 13:32 +0000, samwise wrote:

Hi,

I imagine it just requires something which has usable Linux drivers but as I've never had to do anything in this area, I thought I'd throw it out there and see whether anyone else has ... and could recommend a brand or model.

If we are talking scsi tape drives here then beyond the kernel support for the SCSI adapter you shouldn't need anything and any standard SCSI tape drive should work regardless of format or make.

Usually the tape drive will give you two devices a rewind device (to overwrite the tape contents) and a no rewind device which will append data for consecutive writes. These are usually st0 and nst0 respectively Generally tar will just find these devices and you are set.

You can also control the tape (rewinding, ejecting, turning on/off hardware compression,moving to the next index point or to the end of data etc) with mt

If you want more functionality than tar provides on it's own then there are utilities such as afbackup

I know there are LTO drives etc now that have a USB interface but I am afraid I have no experience of those, whether or not they support the SCSI command sets needed for the above to work I am not sure.