Dump tape to file

[Matt_H]

I recently remembered I have some old backup tapes but no idea what is on them. Rather than restore the files directly to disk, I'd rather dump the whole tape to a file (a .tar?) and then work with it.

Does anyone know what (Amiga-based) tools I can use for this?

[trekiej]

Would Amiga Unix help?
If you do not mind me asking, what kind of tape drives do you have?

[Matt_H]

I do have an Amix system, but it doesn't have the hard drive capacity to hold tape images.
I don't remember exactly what kind of drive it is--need to check once I get this project underway. Might be IBM-branded. It's not an A3070.

[mark_k]

Dumping an arbitrary tape while maintaining the block structure, is quite tricky. Each tape block can be an arbitrary size, with an arbitrary number of filemarks in between runs of data blocks. Some tape formats support multiple partitions too.

However depending on the tape format things might be easier. For example, the QIC-150 format uses fixed-size 512-byte blocks. And it's common for all blocks on the tape to be the same size, with a single filemark between runs. Do you remember which backup program was used to write the tapes?

A few years ago I dumped my original AMIX tape in AmigaOS, I used one of the tape handler packages from Aminet. Maybe BTNTape? Can't remember for sure. There isn't a standardised way to represent the structure of a tape in a single file, so I just dumped each file, naming them 00, 01, 02 etc. on disk.