Restoring a Unix Tar File with Ubuntu

**dFWPspP** · August 13th, 2013

I have all of these old DDS3 and DDS4 tapes that I need to restore the files off of. The only information that I really know is that they were put on the tapes about 10 to 20 years ago using Digital Unix. They are in a Tar file format. I have been using Ubuntu 13.04 to try to restore these files but I've had zero success so far. I have really no idea how to get these files off of here. A couple of commands that we've tried in terminal are:

/media/archive/SCSI/Linux$ sudo dd if=/dev/st0 ibs=128k | tar -vxf -

sudo tar - xzf /dev/st0 /media/archive/SCSI/Linux

/media/archive/SCSI/Linux is what I am trying to restore to and st0 is the Tape Drive name

Please help me out!!
Thanks

**VMC** · August 13th, 2013

can you just copy that tar file to /tmp and then extract from there?
Something like this:

Code:

tar xfpvz /tmp/tarfile -C /media/archive/SCSI/Linux/

**dFWPspP** · August 13th, 2013

The error I got from that is
tar: pvz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Thank you

**VMC** · August 13th, 2013

I made an error on the code section above, in case you just copy&pasted it. Its corrected now.

**dFWPspP** · August 14th, 2013

I didn't just just and paste before, I kinda made my own based off of yours. But when i copy and pasted your modified code the output I got was

tar (child): /tmp/tarfile: Cannont open: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable:exiting now

The funny thing is that when I do write something in terminal sometimes the tape drive will act like its starting up and the terminal response imeadiately responds with whatever error is gives me and then I get a response from the tape drive
Thanks

**steeldriver** · August 14th, 2013

Did you actually copy the tar file off the device into /tmp?

I don't have any experience of this, but there are some specific tools for controlling tape devices (mt) and reading from dds devices in particular (dds-dd - in the package dds2tar)

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/.../mt-gnu.1.html
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/.../dds-dd.1.html

Hope this helps

**zacktu** · August 14th, 2013

There are so many things to go wrong when you're trying to extract from a source that you're not sure of. Instead using the 'x' switch, why not use 't' first? That will list the files in the archive.

**dFWPspP** · August 15th, 2013

Thanks for all of the suggestions. steeldriver, I looked over those manpages before and they were little help but thank you. And zacktu, I tried with the t and it didn't do anything. If ii run 'mt -f /dev/st0 status' it would show the name and one other name and then it would display 0 for everything else such as files, block #, ect. My internship is done today so this no longer a problem for me. But any other suggestions would still be looked at and I can't guarantee that other guys will try it out. I was starting to think that the tapes might have gone bad seeing that the newest ones are 15 years old. Thanks guys.