Q: What are the correct dump parameters to use with my 4mm tape drive?

I use dump for backups, and dump expects the tape length and density as parameters. What length, size, and blocking factor sizes do I use for my 4mm tape drive?

A: Linux dump can detect end-of-media on SCSI tape drives, so the density and size parameters are no longer necessary. (This is also true of ufsdump on recent Sun Solaris releases also.)

The density and size paramters are now only needed on some brain-damaged media (e.g. non-SCSI tapes) that can`t report end-of-media correctly. So something like:

dump 0bf 126 /dev/st0

should be for all 4mm SCSI tape drives, and most other SCSI tape drives as well.