Get Your Tape Drive Working

Specifying Device Name For Tape

btape uses the device-name to identify the device where the Volume can be found. In the case of a tape, this is the physical device name such as /dev/nst0 or /dev/rmt/0ubn depending on your system that you specify on the Archive Device directive. For the program to work, it must find the identical name in the Device resource of the configuration file. If the name is not found in the list of physical names, the utility program will compare the name you entered to the Device names (rather than the Archive device names).

When specifying a tape device, it is preferable that the “non-rewind” variant of the device file name be given. In addition, on systems such as Sun, which have multiple tape access methods, you must be sure to specify to use Berkeley I/O conventions with the device. The b in the Solaris (Sun) archive specification /dev/rmt/0mbn is what is needed in this case. Bacula does not support SysV tape drive behavior.

See below for specifying Volume names.

Specifying Device Name For File

If you are attempting to read or write an archive file rather than a tape, the device-name should be the full path to the archive location including the filename. The filename (last part of the specification) will be stripped and used as the Volume name, and the path (first part before the filename) must have the same entry in the configuration file. So, the path is equivalent to the archive device name, and the filename is equivalent to the volume name.