Tim Jones, does this make you sick, or what ?

[Tim Jones]

I’ll reply here as well since not everyone jumps all over the Cow.

The issue that Tom (and so many others) is running into is not a lack of tar support on OS X, but the inability of the OS X tar version to access a tape drive. Unlike a true Unix system where a tape drive is just another device that is accessed through a kernel hook, Apple decided to remove the tape layer from the Darwin kernel as it is quite complex to maintain.

This is why we created TOLIS Tape Tools in the first place. We have a lot of Unix users (Solaris, SCO, IRIX, etc.) moving from those platforms to OS X back in the day. They all had huge collections of data that was written to Unix tapes using tar and cpio (and in one case, dd) in addition to their BRU tapes. TTT allowed them to restore the data from those tapes directly to their Shiny new Mac systems without the need to keep the old platforms around.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Mathieu Xavier]

I’ll add that I bought TTT to help me restore tapes from other Post facilities. Everything was written to the tape with Tar and TTT worked with the help of some script I wrote to dredge the tape for all tar files.

Cheers,

🙂

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