Taping Data

WFITS

Writing images to exabyte or DAT tape can be done with the IRAF task wfits. After allocating the device and mounting a tape:

wfits filenames devicename yes/no

Where the yes/no response is to answer if the tape is new. There are many other options available and they can be perused in the epar wfits task.

All exabytes are "mtb" and all dats are "mtc" in IRAF.

TAR

The UNIX tar command may also be used to write data to tape. FITS files must first be written to disk using wfits, and then tar may be used to write them to tape.

tar -cvf st1 [file or dir names]

The "c" means create a new tar file, "v" means verbose mode, "f" followed by the device name specifies where the tar file should be written. The period at the end means that the current directory is to be written as the tar file.

NOTE: Do not specify the full path name including the disk name or they will not be readable at other machines. Tar from the directory being saved.

More options are available with the manual entry for tar:

man tar

Here are the device names for UNIX devices:

Exabyte: /dev/nrsx2 all but 1.3m - /dev/nrsx0

Dat: /dev/nrht0 all but 1.3m - /dev/nrht1