[daip] Moving data from backup tapes to a machine with no tape drive?

[Eric Greisen]

BTW - daip and aipsmail are synonyms.

There are lots of aspects to your question and several solutions.

Tools that are available:

1. ftp - the Solaris data files could be copied directly from the Sun
         to the Mac and should work.  Be sure to use binary.

2. TCOPY - can be used to copy a tape to another tape and can be used
         one file at a time to copy tape to disk files.  A proc could
         then be written to make file names in some sequence, e.g.

         proc copythem (j)
            task 'tcopy'; nfiles 0; ncount 1; infile ' '; outta 0
            dowait 1; doeot -1;
            for i = 1:j;
                outfile = version !! ':FILE' !! CHAR(i) !! '.FITS'
                go
                end
            return
         finish

         set intape, mount, set version to the area to write the
         files, then copythem(n) where n is number of files.  If you
         don't know n set it huge and it will quit.

3. RUN WRTPROCS - defines WRTDISK and READISK which write and read a
   large number of FITS files with predictable names.  Mostly used to
   move between dissimilar architectures (e.g. SUN and Linux) where
   FITS disk (or tape) files are required.

4. Perhaps you can create big disk areas on the sun, fill then with
fits files, then move them to the Mac or a linux box and burn CDs or
DVDs as a new backup medium.

Macs do have tape devices - although aips has not tried to use one as
yet - so copying to tape of more modern type might also work.

Note that you are in unexplored territory here - I suspect CD and DVD
burner stuff for old Suns are likely not to be available/working as
one would hope.

Cheers,

Eric