That depends on the tape drive, what interface it uses, whether there's a driver available (or needed), whether it's connected to the local machine or via a network, etc.
It's theoretically possible to hook a tape drive to a Mac, and tape backup solutions for Macs exist, but without any specifics it's impossible to answer your question in much more detail than that.
Tape drives are not designed to be used interactively. They're slow, and generally used for large-scale archiving and retrieval. I suppose you could use one that way, but again it would depend on the tape drive.
it is a Quantum DLT8000 connected via a SCSI PCI Card to a PM dual 500 Gigabit Ethernet. I don´t have the SCSI Card type right now but it is working with DVD Studio Pro, we have done DVD Masters with this combination. we have some SGI machines which can speake to this drive via the terminal (tar commands). do you know if that is possible under OSX too? what would the commands be?
i dont think you could mount a tape drive and access it like any other drive. i believe, based on the nature of the medium, that tape drives are sequential. in order for the OS to do its thang with looking at folders and files, and basically acting interactively, it requires random access to the media, or atleast is my understanding. kind of like why cassette tapes don't have any easy way to access anything other than the first song. you have to rewind and fast forward to find something in the middle.
you could, depending on your drivers and everything, push files onto and off of the tape in an all-or-nothing kind of deal.
that would be an improvement, do you know how to accomplish this under OSX?
faxe
sorry, i aint too familiar with tape drives and osx. osx is a kind of unix-like OS though, and it comes with tar. i don't know sgi machines too well, but i figure that their tar is probably a lot like osx's tar. you can try to compare the man pages and other docs too see if osx's version will handle everything you do.
You can't use a tape drive, of any sort (IDE, SCSI, Firewire) with OS X because they don't include the devices to do it. So you are left with buying something like Retrospect to add this functionality. Check to see if they support your drive (they probably do because it should just be a generic SCSI tape drive.) This is actually a real pain. My guess is that Apple did not include tape devices (unlike every other version of Unix) in order to get Retrospect to get their software over to OS X. But it is very inconvenient. I've been hoping it would eventually show up and then we could "tar", or if you want to maintain the resource forks with HFS+ files "pax" files over to tape.
One thing you can do if you want to get cute is tar something from your OS X box over to the tape drive on your SGI. Or you can just tar a file to your SGI and then add it to the tape over there. Its been a while since I've done this on the SGI but something like:
tar cBf - mydirectory | ssh -l userid sgi.machine.name "(XXX)".
You would need to replace the "XXX" with whatever command you use to add files to your tape, assuming that the "input files" are coming via standard input.
Your best bet is probably to go with Retrospect. I've been waiting for a generic tape device to show up and it has not happened yet.
Comments
It's theoretically possible to hook a tape drive to a Mac, and tape backup solutions for Macs exist, but without any specifics it's impossible to answer your question in much more detail than that.
Tape drives are not designed to be used interactively. They're slow, and generally used for large-scale archiving and retrieval. I suppose you could use one that way, but again it would depend on the tape drive.
Originally posted by Amorph
That ...............tape drive.
thanks for your reply,
it is a Quantum DLT8000 connected via a SCSI PCI Card to a PM dual 500 Gigabit Ethernet. I don´t have the SCSI Card type right now but it is working with DVD Studio Pro, we have done DVD Masters with this combination. we have some SGI machines which can speake to this drive via the terminal (tar commands). do you know if that is possible under OSX too? what would the commands be?
faxe
you could, depending on your drivers and everything, push files onto and off of the tape in an all-or-nothing kind of deal.
Originally posted by thuh Freak
...... push files onto and off of the tape in an all-or-nothing kind of deal.
hi,
that would be an improvement, do you know how to accomplish this under OSX?
faxe
Originally posted by faxe_tv
hi,
that would be an improvement, do you know how to accomplish this under OSX?
faxe
sorry, i aint too familiar with tape drives and osx. osx is a kind of unix-like OS though, and it comes with tar. i don't know sgi machines too well, but i figure that their tar is probably a lot like osx's tar. you can try to compare the man pages and other docs too see if osx's version will handle everything you do.
One thing you can do if you want to get cute is tar something from your OS X box over to the tape drive on your SGI. Or you can just tar a file to your SGI and then add it to the tape over there. Its been a while since I've done this on the SGI but something like:
tar cBf - mydirectory | ssh -l userid sgi.machine.name "(XXX)".
You would need to replace the "XXX" with whatever command you use to add files to your tape, assuming that the "input files" are coming via standard input.
Your best bet is probably to go with Retrospect. I've been waiting for a generic tape device to show up and it has not happened yet.
It sure is poor design that you cannot talk directly to the device as /dev/rmt/0 (for example).
There is not mt equivilent for OS X. (tsk tsk tsk)
It even shoddier that they sell a fairly large disk array and can't even supply a backup solution.
Dobby.
*RANT starts - no wonder they are in such a shoddy state with the G4 as they seem to have an extreme lack of forward thinking - end of RANT *