As a supplement to my last blog post on archiving to an LTO tape drive using conventional open source utilities like tar, this is how you can save a filelist of the tar output (same as would be outputted by tar -tvf /dev/nst0) to a text file, while also redirecting tar through mbuffer to the tape drive.
tar --label="backup-20230101-volume2" -b512 -cvf - --exclude='.DS_Store' --files-from=/tmp/directories-list.txt 2> >(tee /tmp/tar-filelist.txt >&2) | mbuffer -m 4G -P 80 -s 262144 -o /dev/nst0
It’s critical that the output of tee is again redirected to stderr using >&2 — if you don’t do this, the text from the log will end up in the stdout that gets piped to the mbuffer, which will get written to tape. In that circumstance, tar will not be able to understand the archive when reading it back, since there will be spurious text data.
If you aren’t piping tar’s stdout through mbuffer, you can avoid the redirection problem because tar won’t be outputting to stdout at all. For example:
tar --label="backup-20230101-volume2" -b512 -cvf /dev/nst0 --exclude='.DS_Store' --files-from=/tmp/directories-list.txt 2> tee /tmp/tar-filelist.txt