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8.1.1: Rewinding and non-rewinding devices

It is common usage for Un*x tape device drivers to provide two different kinds of tape devices: one that rewinds the tape when the device is closed and one that does not. Usually the non-rewinding device has an `n' prefix in front of its name which is otherwise the same as for the auto-rewinding device.

The Linux floppy tape device driver ftape follows this convention. Moreover, not only that the non-rewinding devices do not rewind the tape when the driver is closed, they also cache a lot of data which belongs to the header segments or the volume table segment. This is done because for synchronizing all that data with the data on the tape cartridge one needs to rewind the tape to BOT and then write and verify three floppy tape segments which would take some minutes.

However, this caching practice is dangerous as floppy tape drives provide no measure to prevent cartridges from being removed from the tape drive (there is no door that could be locked). Therefore one has to be careful with the ftape driver in the sense that one must not forget to rewind a cartridge before removing it from the tape drive.

Therefore use

mt -f /dev/qft0 rew

before removing the cartridge; possibly replacing `/dev/qft0' by the device node you used.


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