[Using tar with a Tape Drive]
I use tar in conjunction with my Seagate DAT drive. If you issue any of the previous commands in this HOW-TO without the f option and a tarball filename, you will find that tar will default to writing the files to the device /dev/rsa0 (raw sequential access device 0). Basically this is your first SCSI tape drive. If you have more than one tape drive you would like to use, you can issue the f option and the device name (rsa0, rsa1 etc.) of your specific tape drive instead of a filename.
Examples:
Backing up the current directory to Tape:
$ tar cv .