[Gllug] How much space left on a tape...

[t.clarke]

re compressing a tar onto tape using bz2 --
are you asking how much space is left on the tape ??

are you compressing 'on the fly' direct to the tape?

I guess the easist way of seing how much is left on the tape is to
dd the tape to /dev/null specifying a suitable block size and see how many
blocks it reads.   Calculate the size written and the balance is theoretically
available,  less an allowance for bad patches etc.

Of course the theoretical capacity of a tape is precisely that  - if my
knowledge of tape technology is even remotely correct, the size of the blocks
written to the tape will determine the number of inter-block gaps and therefore
the amount of 'wasted' tape.

I suppose you could also simply do an 'rfm' to skip to the end of the tape
and then dd  /dev/zero or something in suitable block size until the tape
bombs out. That should give an indication of how much space is really left!

Just my humble ramblings late at night,  so ignore me if I am talking out of
the back of my head,  lol


Tim
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