There is really no good documentation about SCSI tape backups on the web - I know, since I went through setting up my own recently. I really don't know enough about them to set up a LDP "howto" on SCSI tape drives, but I may give it a shot anyway - just to get _something_ out there. Your tape drive should show up as /dev/st0 To back up your system to the tape drive with tar, cd / tar cvMf /dev/st0 * There are probably lots of options you should add to that basic syntax, to prevent backing up the /proc directory, and/or any CD-ROM drives you may have mounted, etc... I'm sure someone else would be able to elaborate the tar command (and/or CPIO) - since tar is used for nearly everything (not just SCSI tape backups) When the SCSI driver loads (via module or directly in the kernel), it should display a summary of devices on each SCSI id - including your tape drive. If your tape drive has an auto-changer, you may have to enable probing SCSI LUNs in the hardware configuration for the auto-changer to be detected.