.\" Copyright (c) 1985, 1990, 1991, 1993 .\" The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions .\" are met: .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the .\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. .\" 3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors .\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software .\" without specific prior written permission. .\" .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE .\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL .\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS .\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT .\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY .\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF .\" SUCH DAMAGE. .\" .Dd December 20, 2006 .Dt TCOPY 1 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm tcopy .Nd copy and/or verify mag tapes .Sh SYNOPSIS .Nm .Op Fl cvx .Op Fl s Ar maxblk .Oo Ar src Op Ar dest .Oc .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Nm utility is designed to copy magnetic tapes. The only assumption made about the tape layout is that there are two sequential EOF marks at the end. By default, the .Nm utility will print information about the sizes of records and files found on the .Pa /dev/sa0 tape, or on the tape specified by the .Ar src argument. If a destination tape is also specified by the .Ar dest argument, a copy of the source tape will be made. The blocking on the destination tape will be identical to that used on the source tape. Copying a tape will yield the same program output as if just printing the sizes. .Pp The following options are available: .Bl -tag -width ".Fl s Ar maxblk" .It Fl c Copy .Ar src to .Ar dest and then verify that the two tapes are identical. .It Fl s Ar maxblk Specify a maximum block size, .Ar maxblk . .It Fl v Given the two tapes .Ar src and .Ar dest , verify that they are identical. .It Fl x Output all informational messages to the standard error instead of the standard output. This option is useful when .Ar dest is given as .Pa /dev/stdout . .El .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr mt 1 , .Xr mtio 4 .Sh HISTORY The .Nm command appeared in .Bx 4.3 . .Sh BUGS .Bl -item .It Modern tape drives may return a SCSI "Incorrect Length Indicator (ILI)" for each read with a different block size that what is on the tape, and that slows things down a lot. This can be disabled with the .Xr mt 1 command: .Bd -literal -offset indent $ mt param sili -s 1 .Ed .It Writing an image of a tape to a file does not preserve much more than the raw data. Block size(s) and tape EOF marks are lost which would otherwise be preserved in a tape-to-tape copy. .It End of data (EOD) is determined by two sequential EOF marks with no data between them. There used to be old systems which typically wrote three EOF's between tape files. The .Nm utility will erroneously stop copying early in this case. .It When using the copy/verify option .Fl c , .Nm does not rewind the tapes prior to start. A rewind is performed after writing, prior to the verification stage. If one does not start at the beginning-of-tape (BOT) then the comparison may not be of the intended data. .El