On Fri, 21 Mar 1997, Max Bell wrote:

> >From: Jon Ribbens <jon@oaktree.co.uk>
> >
> >(Why do mt and tar use /dev/rst0 as a default? Especially for 'mt',
> 
> I've never understood that either, except perhaps the intention is/was
> to make sure tapes were returned to a removable position by default --
> if the non-rewinding device was the default, the tape would be left in
> an unwound state.  An inexperienced user might not know how to fix this,
> and try to remove the tape anyway (ouch).
>

A dat drive will auto rewind when you hit eject so that doesn't apply.
(Well it does on the DDS drives I have used)
Note it may be useful to store a tape at the end of a file ready for
a new file to be added next time it is inserted. Though I don't think
this can be done with DDS dat drives anyway.

nrst0 seems the the better choice to me.

> 
> The problems you are encountering are due to two factors: (1) You need to
> tell `dump` that it is dumping to a device as big or bigger than the size
> of the filesystem involved so it doesn't think it needs to change "tapes".
> To do this, play with the "d"ensity and "s"ize options.  Beware that due to
> its age (over 20 years) it cannot really cope with the real numbers, so you
> will need to understate the density and overstate the size of the "tape".

Use the -B option to set the tape size in KB this option is relatively
new in dump.

--Sean