Tape backup using tar

[Dave Mitchell]

On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 04:06:37PM +0100, Stuart Bailey wrote:
>  This is a 72Gb tape drive, and it is reporting 'no space left on
>  device'  after backing up just 2048 bytes.

This is most commonly caused by using the wrong device name - so rather
than writing to a device, tar just creates some plain file under /dev and
populates it until /dev becomes full.

-- 
"The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright,
antitrust and export control laws"
    -- SCO smoking crack again.