Hi All, Very day, I need to collect data to a tape at different directory on the same machine, and I only can append the data to the same tape, my problem is when I doing appending, it always read from the beginning of the tape to the end and then start appending, it need a lot of waiting time, so my question is can I keep the read/write head at the end of the tape and then cd to the other directory and start appending data from the new directory to the tape? Thanks for any kind of reply.

This depends on your tape drive and OS. Something like a DAT tape allows you to create and access volumes on a tape using the mt, magnetic tape control, command. The mt command with the proper argument places the tape head where you want. Of course, controlling and accessing the tape volumes is an administation headache. Back in 1993, Sys Admin magazine published an article, "Fast Backup and Restore Scripts for DAT Drives". Their website is at http://www.samag.com. I don't know how much luck you'll have accessing this article short of ordering their archive CD.

I am using HP-UX, I have did some homework, I found this command: tar -rvf /dev/rmt/0mn This command will tell the tape drive not to rewind, I have try this: tar -cvf /dev/rmt/0mn archive_May2006 cd /home tar -rvf /dev/rmt/0mn * It give me an error. Do anyone know how to use it?