MTD Utility

Charon-PAR provides the utility MTD , a Magnetic Tape Dump utility which can copy Charon-PAR virtual tape image files to or from a physical tape device connected to the host system. MTD is a Linux command line utility.

The MTD utility is used to:

Create a Charon-PAR tape image from a physical tape
Write a tape image to a physical tape.

Command syntax:

$ mtd [options] <tape device name> <tape container name> (tape to file)

$ mtd [options] <tape container name> <tape device name> (file to tape)

Parameters:

Usage: mtd [options] <tape-drive-name> <file-name> - dump tape content to file
mtd <file-name> <tape-drive-name> - restore dump to tape
mtd <file-name> <file-name> - convert formats
mtd <file-name> - examine tape dump and check integrity

<tape-drive-name> - tape drive
<file-name> - name of tape container file (.mtd or .vtape)

Options:
-l <file-name> - log file name (.log)
-n - do not rewind tape
-r <number> - number of attempts to retry failing tape reads
-i - ignore failing tape reads (implies -r 0)
-p - disable progress reporting
-v - enable verbose trace of data transfer (implies -p)
-s - output tape image in SMA format (not relevant for Charon-PAR)
-g - gather statistics and print upon completion
-a - do not print logo

Example physical tape to container:

$ mtd -l tape1.txt -r 10 /dev/st5 /charon/tapes/tape1.vtape

Example container to physical tape:

$ mtd /charon/tapes/tape1.vtape /dev/st5