One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. To show what these paths are and allow you to search, run the output to a text file:

tar -tMvf /dev/st0 > /tapeout.txt &

Once you know the exact path, change to the correct directory, and restore the file:

tar -xvf /dev/st0 netadmin/database.db1

You might consider restoring to a completely different directory. Do be wary about non-relative paths. There is always a chance that the tar archive hasn’t stripped off the leading /. To restore an entire directory, use the path:

tar -xvf /dev/st0 netadmin/backups/july/