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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: tape to tape copy
Keywords: copy tape boottape
Message-ID: <13837@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 12 Sep 90 20:19:47 GMT
References: <1205@manta.NOSC.MIL>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <1205@manta.NOSC.MIL> bigjohn@manta.NOSC.MIL (John Morris) writes:
>One method involves the 'dd' command but this involves having enough
>disk space to accomodate the file.

You should be able to "dd" from tape to tape, also.

>Question: Is there a way, if you have two cartridge tape drives, to
>directly move the data from one tape onto the other through a reasonable 
>size buffer.

There is also a simple utility commonly called "tcopy" for copying tapes
(or other files where preserving record size is important).  Look around
for it on your system; if you can't find it I could mail you a version.

The big problem with "streaming" tapes is that they are horribly slow
if you can't keep them streaming, which UNIX applications seldom can.