Senior Project - ratPACK

Digital Audio Tape (DAT) technology is now being used for high capacity backup of workstations and medium size computing systems. DAT tape drives are also being incorporated into autochanger systems that push the total data capacity in the peripheral to greater than 10 gigabytes. The result is automatic access to large amounts of storage at significantly lower cost. DAT tape drives have a unique feature that other tape technologies lack -- DAT drives can do a "fast search" to a particular place on the tape. This allows random access to data, which can significantly decrease the time required to retrieve a file. DAT autochangers can then randomly access a particular file within the 10 gigabytes. The proposal was to develop backup programs to take advantage of the unique characteristics of DAT tape drives and DAT tape autochangers. The project, implemented in C under the HPUX operating system, allowed for flexible, largely unattended backup and restore of large networks of machines.