@ricci One should not make media look like a frisbee if data preservation is the end goal.

#humor #magtape #unix #frisbeeGolf #sportsBall #tarBall

@spacehobo @brouhaha @tastytronic

Talking of cool formats:

I was just thinking of Rahul Dhesi's ZOO after posting that, coincidentally.

The format was designed so that backwards seeks were only necessary when actually deleting/updating entries. One could do a list entirely forwards, and even purging deleted entries could be done entirely forwards.

Then the world went and settled on ZIP, which needed several backwards seeks just to find the central directory.

One has to appreciate that #Rust programmers are rediscovering all of these old problems anew almost 40 years later. (-:

https://github.com/zip-rs/zip2/pull/197

#ZIP #ZOO #magtape #Unix #archivers

@spacehobo @brouhaha

Yes. Berkeley FFS broke things up into cylinder groups and had an allocation policy of putting various things in the same CG and other things not, because much the same idea was also useful for reducing seeks on discs.

(Even OS/2 got in on the act. (-: Its FAT filesytem driver put the extended attributes record for every file in front of the file data where it could. Which was why it was a bad idea to defragment the "EA DATA. SF" file so that it ended up stuffed all at the start of the volume.)

And the elevator algorithm in the block cache would at least make the tape do straight runs in one direction and then rewind, where it could.

Putting filesystem *and* swap on tape boggles the mind, though. (-:

#Unix #magtape #filesystems #tar #DEC #retrocomputing

@brouhaha

Even with Ryan's generous posting limits here on this node, there wasn't room to expand on what "wildly adventurous" encompassed, but it definitely encompassed having the right magtape kit.

So of course DECTape. (-: People like this ran their Unices on DEC kit.

Random old Usenet example:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms/c/R6BtGeKB640/m/-RuOQO0WICgJ

There's an earlier reference in that thread to someone having both filesystem and swap on tape having been reported on in the BSTJ.

And I've been reminded, the subject of #rwhod having come up earlier this week, that there was once an rtar command for accessing other people's magtape devices over the Internet.

Usefully, there's a comp.sources.unix index in what I'm backing up with #pax, so I looked it up. It says that rtar was in volume 2 in 1985.

#Unix #magtape #tar #retrocomputing #DEC

Waking in the middle of the night, checking the computer, and finding that it is still chugging away and has done another 20GiB in a couple of hours is also probably what they did then, too.

Although not in GiB. (-:

#Unix #tar #magtape #backups