BackupEDGE

Secure Backup And Disaster Recovery Software For Linux/Unix

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Tape Control

BackupEDGE tries to get the most out of your tape drive by combining low-level hardware control transparently into the backup process. It also detects and works with OBDR tm bootable tape drives on supported operating systems, allowing you to create a backup tape and bootable Crash Recovery tape in one!

Included with BackupEDGE for all platforms is edge.tape, our low-level SCSI / IDE / ATAPI / SATA / USB device control program. It is used internally by BackupEDGE, but also available for end users as a command-line tool. It enables BackupEDGE to perform low-level queries of your tape drive, modify its hardware block size, compression status, etc. Further, it provides a consistent interface across operating systems. Using this tool (and assuming your tape drive has the appropriate support, of course), you can:

  • Modify the low-level block size of the device
  • Modify the hardware compression status of the device
  • Partition a tape
  • Switch active tape partitions

  • Rewind / Retention / Erase / Load / Unload a tape
  • Detect tape capacity

  • Determine remaining capacity after a backup
  • Read HP TapeAlert(tm) status
  • Check for media present / density
  • Control devices on any machine with

    • BackupEDGE installed

An API is provided allowing you to use edge.tape manually to monitor or control your tape drives from your own scripts.

These and other control features are available standard in
BackupEDGE for all platforms.

BackupEDGE Product Features