Tape-drive Hardware and Data Loss Protection

Linux supports tape drives for use as backup devices. The common types of tape-drive hardware are:

1. SCSI: Small Computer Systems Interface is a standard for connecting peripherals to your computer via a standard hardware interface.
2. ATAPI/IDE: ATAPI (AT Attachment Packet Interface) is a standard for connecting CD-ROM and tape backup drives to your computer via a standard hardware interface, and is part of the Enhanced IDE. Generally, IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is used as an interface to address hard disk drives.
3. "Floppy" tape drives

SCSI tape drives are in use in most commercial settings. These drives are usually DAT (Digital Audio Tape) or Digital Data Storage (DDS) drives. ATAPI/IDE drives include tape drives and other sorts of ATAPI devices (such as Iomega drives) that can be attached to the IDE interface. Remember that there is a maximum of four IDE devices per controller. If you are adding IDE hard drives and CD-ROM drives, you need to consider this limitation and install additional controllers if necessary.

Linux also supports tape devices such as the QIC-80^[1] that connect using a system's floppy controller. The next lesson describes tape control commands.

Question: Can you try the intensely laborious and annoying test of ensuring all the tape drives are loaded up with media and try the

devbra --dev

command please?
Answer: Yes drives are visible when we execute lsscsi command, but the same number of tape drives are not visible when we execute devbra command only few tap drives are visible even if we loaded the medias on all the tape drives.

[1]QIC-80: QIC 80 is a tape standard that can be used to determine which tapes or devices will work with a particular operating system or backup utility.