Tape Dumped Tarball =link= Page

# Read from tape device, write to a .tar file dd if=/dev/st0 of=old_backup.tar bs=64k

When a tape is dumped to disk, the resulting image preserves these block boundaries. If a modern archivist attempts to extract this using default settings (which assume 20KB blocking factors), the extraction may fail due to alignment issues. The physical padding added by the tape drive to fill the last block of a file often appears as "junk data" at the end of a tar file if not properly truncated. tape dumped tarball