The ease of configuring Linux to support a tape drive depends on the Linux distribution and version, the type of drive, the interface it uses, and whether the drive is present when Linux is installed or is added later. If you use a modern, mainstream ATAPI or SCSI drive with a recent Linux distribution, installation will likely be straightforward. If you use an older distribution, an obsolescent or proprietary drive, or a drive that uses an interface other than ATAPI or SCSI, you may encounter significant problems getting the drive to work, if indeed you can get it working at all. You can use the following tape drives with Linux:

Travan, DDS, and AIT tape drives

Recent Linux releases natively support a wide variety of Travan, DDS, and AIT tape drives with ATAPI or SCSI interfaces. If you install and configure the drive and interface properly before you install Linux, the Linux installer will likely recognize the drive and automatically configure Linux to use it. In fact, Linux often does a better job than Windows 2000/XP of recognizing and configuring Travan, DDS, and AIT tape drives.

If you install a tape drive in a system with Linux already installed, log in as root and run the hardware detection utility (e.g., Kudzu in Redhat or Mandrake and Discover in Debian). If the drive is supported, the utility detects the drive, installs drivers, and automatically configures Linux to use the drive. If the drive is not recognized, check the web sites for the drive and your Linux distro to determine how to configure the drive manually.

USB and FireWire (IEEE-1394) drives require a 2.4 or higher Linux kernel.

OnStream ADR tape drives

Linux support for OnStream tape drives differs according to the command set used by the drive. All second-generation (ADR2) drives and first-generation (ADR) ADR30, ADR50, and ADR50e SCSI drives use the standard SCSI command set, so the standard st (SCSI tape) driver suffices to interface the drive to the backup application (the ATAPI ADR2.60IDE drive requires both the ide-scsi and st drivers).

Most first-generation OnStream ADR drives—the DI30, DI30 FAST, DP30, USB30, SC30, SC30e, SC50, SC50e, and FW30—use a proprietary command set that optimizes those drives for storing streaming video. That command set differs significantly from the standard ATAPI and SCSI command sets, which means the standard st driver does not support these drives. Full (or even partial) Linux support requires a kernel rebuild or various workarounds. Fortunately, a modified version of the st driver, called the osst driver, is available. The osst driver interfaces standard backup applications to the proprietary command set of older ADR drives.

Although the ide-tape driver supports the OnStream DI30 drive, we strongly recommend using the ide-scsi and osst drivers instead. The ide-tape driver writes tapes in LIN3 logical format, whereas osst writes tapes in LIN4 logical format. That means the osst driver reads tapes written with ide-tape, but the ide-tape driver cannot read tapes written with osst. Also, various problems have been reported using ide-tape with DI30 drives, ranging from inability to restore files to complete failure to recognize the drive.

FDC-based drives

Travan TR-3 and earlier QIC drives use the floppy drive controller (FDC) interface, either directly or in some cases via a parallel port connection. These drives are now so old that most have been retired, but if for some reason you must use an FDC-based tape drive on a Linux system, you may be able to get it running using ftape. The ftape driver supports QIC-40, QIC-80, QIC-3010 (TR-2), QIC-3020 (TR-3), Iomega Ditto 2GB, and Ditto Max drives. For more information about ftape, see http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Ftape-HOWTO.html.

We do not recommend using ftape in PCI-based systems, which is to say in any modern system at all. The ftape driver has known incompatibilities with some PCI motherboards. For details, view README.PCI in the ftape distribution.

Once Linux recognizes a tape drive, you can use bundled Linux applications such as tar, mt, mtx, dump, restore, and cpio to write and read tapes in the drive. You can also use full-featured backup applications such as BRU (http://www.tolisgroup.com/), Amanda (http://www.amanda.org/), and Arkeia (http://www.arkeia.com/) to implement a formal backup program.

Here are some useful sites that cover various aspects of using tape drives with Linux:

http://www.linuxtapecert.org

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/index.html