ftape is a driver program that controls various low-cost tape drives that connect to the floppy controller.

ftape is not a backup program as such; it is a device driver, which allows you to use your floppy tape drive (just like the SoundBlaster 16 driver let you use your sound card) through the device files /dev/[n]qft[0-3].

The original version of ftape was written by Bas Laarhoven <bas@vimec.nl>, with "a little help from his friends" to sort out the ECC (Error Correcting Code) stuff.

All versions of ftape are copyrighted under the GNU General Public License, which basically says: go ahead and share this with the world, just don't disallow other people from copying it further.

ftape is quite stable, and has been that for some time now. It is reliable enough for critical backups (but it's always a good idea to check your backups, so you won't get a nasty surprise some day).

ftape supports drives that conform to the QIC-117 and one of the QIC-40, QIC-80, QIC-40, QIC-3010, and QIC-3020 standards as well as the Ditto 2GB and Ditto Max (Pro) tape drives which partly use proprietary extensions of the QIC-117 command set. ftape supports also certain kinds of parallel port tape drives. Check out the Ftape HOWTO for more details.

ftape supports neither QIC-02, IDE (ATAPI), nor SCSI tape drives. SCSI drives are accessed as /dev/[n]st[0-7] and are supported by the kernel through the SCSI drivers. ATAPI tape drives are supported by the kernel since 1.3.46 through the IDE drivers.

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