Hi People, Just Wondrin' if anyone could shed some light on my problem?? I have a Mandrake 9.0 server,AMD 1700+,512mb,60gb H/D and a HP C1533A DDS2 DAT drive. I need to somehow backup my extensive collection of mp3's and cant seem to find a solution on how to put them on to dat. The size of the directory is 5.8gb. The tape fills on 4gb. I have checked all dip switches etc.. but still no joy.Would be greatfull if anyone could spare an idea. Cheers.

Sounds like you have a DDS2 (4Gb/8Gb) and due to the fact that MP3 compression is pretty good I don't think you'll be able to fit them all onto one tape. You could use tar (Tape ARchive) to make all the files into one big one, compress it to see if it makes any difference and then use the split command to chop it up into 4Gb pieces, one for each tape.

hi 3Dave, I have been trying tar,cpio,gzip all kinds of tricks but nothing. I have even installed Arkeia on the server but it still dont work. The tar command knocks about 200mb off the original size. It still doesn't fit. Looks like 2 tapes, what do u think?

WinRAR does good multimedia compression. I know you can get unrar for linux and the windoze version runs under wine. Looking like two tapes though....

Although MP3's are pretty ubiquitous and I hear changing from one compressed audio format to another compressed format can degrade quality unless you re-encode from the original CDs ... But have you considered using Ogg files instead of MP3s? (http://www.vorbis.com/) The Ogg files I've created were about 800kb - 1MB of smaller than their corresponding MP3 files and they played in xmms right out of the box for me in RedHat 8...but from my estimates, even then you may still have a hard time fitting 5.8GB into 4GB?!