Tar - (Tape Archival Drive) How to use it?

[malcolm man]

So, Kinda a noob question:

I just heard of Archival tapes/ the TAR format. I did a little bit of Wiki research, but don't really understand how one would implicate such a thing.

Could one use it to archive footage? If so, how?

I don't expect a full explanation here, but if someone could like me to some informative sites, I'd be happy to do the reading myself.

Thanks.

 

[THoff]

TAR is a Unix/Linux (tape) archive format.

You can use TAR to archive any data you like, whether it is footage or not. The bigger questions is what media will you use? Also, TAR itself provides no compression, only packaging of the data.

 

[malcolm man]

Well, I'd be looking to archive my Projects basically. MXF files, photoshop files, audio files, etc...

My average project runs about 25-30 GB. I'm just looking at some alternatives to hard drives or DVDs.

So, I would only be able to access this data through a linux os?

Does anyone on these forums use archival tapes? Is this even a practical archival solution?

Just curious...