Post #2754024

Can someone with #linux tape experience help me understand this perculiar behavior. I'm in the process of manually extracting backups from tapes created using amanda. So the first 32k bytes block of the file is header that i want to skip followed by the tar archive. So I'd assume that `dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k skip=1 | tar -tvf -` would do the trick. Instead tar always complaints about an incorrect archive. Now here comes the kicker: When I first copy a couple blocks of the tape into a file and then try the same it works. `dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k count=10 of=test.bin && bd if=test.bin bs=32k skip=1 | tar -tvf -` Obviously in all cases the tape was positionend at correct beginnings of files. I could solve it by using `tail -c +32769` but that just seemed unelegant. So it appears to me as if a skip of a block is not really of a 32k block, but instead of a different unit of block device specific #archive #homelab #admin