DLT 40 How do I access this tape drive?

There is a cron job running on a machine on our office network. It was set up by somebody else. The script run by the cron backs up a samaba share onto tape. The job is definitely running, because if I run the backup manually, I can see the tar command's output and the drive comes alive and starts doing stuff....

The cron just runs the simple command:

tar cv /export/share >/dev/st0

but how would I access the contents of /dev/st0 if I had to recover one of these backups?

the 'ls' and 'file' commands tell me the following :

root@lon-fs-1:~# ls -al /dev/st0
crw-r----- 1 root disk 9, 0 Jul 18 1994 /dev/st0
root@lon-fs-1:~# file /dev/st0
/dev/st0: character special (9/0)

I don't know what a 'character special' file is, and it looks rather small to me. The timestamp is really old too. What is all this about?

thanks
christo

okay - I have sorted this all out now

christo

Just for the edification of us all, what's the solution? Do you redirect /dev/st0 into tar ?

yeah - I just untar the device file and out it all comes... just like magic

/me likes that !

christo