GNU tar - Media Go to the first , previous , next , last section, table of contents . A few special cases about tape handling warrant more detailed description. These special cases are discussed below.
Many complexities surround the use of tar on tape drives.
Since the creation and manipulation of archives located on magnetic tape was the original purpose of tar , it contains many features making such manipulation easier. The amount of data a tape or disk holds depends not only on its size, but also on how it is formatted. A 2400 foot long reel of mag tape holds 40 megabytes of data when formated at 1600 bits per inch. Media quality does deteriorate with use, however. Most tapes or disks should be disgarded when they begin to produce data errors.