FT(8)

NAME
ft - QIC 40/80 floppy tape drive controller

SYNOPSIS
ft [-f tape] [description]

DESCRIPTION
The ft command allows multi-volume dump, extract, and view of tape labels, for any pre-formatted QIC-40/80 tapes. It is totally system dependent, and has nothing to do with the QIC standards.

ft is used primarily as a filter for tape i/o. For example, to save and compress the /usr directory to tape:

    % tar cvzf - /usr | ft "/usr save"

To extract /usr from tape:

    % ft | tar xvzf -

BUGS
Formatting/Verifying is in the works. You will need to use your existing backup program to do this for the time being.

NOTES
The floppy tape driver supports tape drives such as the Colorado Jumbo, Mountain Summit Express, some Archive/Conner models, and probably many others. These tape drives attach between your floppy disk controller card and your existing floppy disks' ribbon cable. This driver does not currently support attachments via a proprietary tape controller card or by the parallel port.

QIC-40/80 drives are more CPU intensive than a SCSI drive. This is really only a factor if your machine is networked or has multiple concurrent users. For personal use (i.e. your typical home Unix user), response time is perfectly acceptable. The tape drives cannot detect write errors. Instead, they make up for it by using CRC's, error correction, and bad spot mapping. Formatting time is extremely long because of this. The drive makes a first pass over the entire tape writing out sectors. It then makes a second pass at a slower rate than usual (for sensitivity) to detect bad spots on the tape. Typically it takes an hour to format a single QIC-80 (120Mb uncompressed) tape.

AUTHOR
Steve Gerakines <steve2@genesis.nred.ma.us>