PS/2 AIX Tape Utilities & IBM external tape

[Jamie Watson]

>If you're going to back up AIX filesystems, you might do better with
>the AIX backup or tar commands.
>Perhaps some AIX guru would be kind enough to give an exact sequence of
>commands for this?

You are correct, using 'dd' and a large block size makes writing tapes
under AIX reasonably fast.  A typical command is:

    $ tar cf - files | dd obs=512k of=/dev/rmt0

The block size can be a large (or small) as your system memory allows;
actually there is only marginal gain above something like 256k.

I would absolutely not recommend using the AIX backup commands if there
is any chance that you will ever need to read the backup tapes on any
non-AIX system.  This is yet another example of IBM inventing a "better"
solution for something that already has several perfeclty adequate
alternatives generally available.

jw