Backing up and encryption with GPG 4775

shakiro I understand that is the case. I use tape as a backup medium. AFAIK, most tape drives have hardware compression that works block-by-block (tape blocks, that is; I use a blocksize of 65536 bytes on my tape drive as that seems the most efficient).

I used to use cpio to write the tapes. I now use BRU that sounds pretty much like cpio to me. Since I have never had a failure with Exabyte VXA tape drives, I do not know how BRU would manage the possible failures. The tape drive does read after write as the tape is being written. Then BRU rewinds the tape and rereads it to verify that the tape was written correctly. I always use hardware compression. I have two such tape drives; a VXA-1 and a VXA-2. I can read a tape written on one machine on another machine, so they seem quite compatable.

If you encrypt the entire tape, you might wish to obscure the file boundaries from the black hats. But if you have sensitive data on your machine, the sensitive data should probably be encrypted anyway, and there would be little need for multiple encryption.

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