Take care of your tapes. There are three 8mm tape drives, one on SGI4, DEC4 and DEC10. The ones on SGI4 and DEC4 will hold 2.5 GB of data and the one on DEC10 will hold 5 GB of data. There are several 4mm tape drives. These drives hold up to 2 GB of data.
Most tape archives are in the tar format or the cpio format.
The next two sections describe the use of the tar command to create tar archives, and the use of SGI desktop tools to create tar or cpio archives. The tar command is a utility for tape archiving. It is explained completely and concisely in its 'man' page, but no examples are given, and the most common command line usage is not terribly obvious to beginners. The sections below describe how to write files to tape, check the contents of a tape, and read files from tape. The 'c' option to tar causes archives to be created.