I have a situation. I was supposed to run tar -x to recover a tar file from a tape but I pressed c and forgot to put the tape on readonly. The file was on fsf position 23, but the tape had 27 files. I know that file 23 is lost but since I pressed ctrl+c to cancel the tar command, can I still hope to somehow recover the other tar files? I tried fsf past file 23 and all I get is input/output error.I was thinking maybe do a dump from file 23 using dd and then get this file and use a signature file recovery tool, like photorec. Is this doable?
recover partially overwritten tape from tar -c
tar;data recovery;tape
This question is completely device specific, depending on the drive hardware and its associated driver.When botching tape operations (like interrupting a write) you can easily make a non-readable symbol or even a non-readable stretch on the tape. You've already shown that your driver is not capable of reading past the junk your aborted write left since mt fsf just issues an ioctl that asks the driver to just skip to the next EOF mark. Since the driver returns EIO you are likely not going to be able to get it to do any better.Depending on how vital this tape is to you, the next step is probably sending it to a forensic recovery firm skilled in the art of magtapes. Your data is probably there but most drivers don't know how to cope with the marker defect you introduced.