check the usage of a tape

[S.C. Fun]

Any idea how to check how much space was left in a tape?
Is it possible to mount a tape drive?
Thanks in advance.

[Patrick Wallek]

To answer both your questions at once: No.

Some backup products will guesstimate the amount of space left on a tape, but they just go by the amount of data that is written to tape. That is not a good measure as you can have varying compression ratios based on the files you are storing to tape, so you might get only 40GB on one DLT tape on a DLT7000, and on another you might get 80GB.

If you are asking if you can mount a tape device like you mount a disk.... I don't think so. I've never heard of anyone trying it.

[R Madhavan]

For your first question, i do not think it is possible. But much depends on the format & the S/W you use to backup .
For the 2nd Q, some one was saying NFS mount of tape drive, i really do not know whether it is possible, you may see,
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x2a94e7e60861d511abcd0090277a778c,00.html