Keep captures private¶

Tapes bought second-hand are other people's backups. The bench tapes came from a PC recycler and hold strangers' documents, mail and accounts. Treat every capture, and everything made from it, as personal data.

Rules¶

• Never publish captures, images, volumes, tars or damage reports, or anything from inside them: file names, tape labels, directory listings or file contents. Not in issues, pull requests, test fixtures, screenshots or logs.
• Header and volume-table metadata is fine to share when you report a problem: the format code, the geometry, the drive's report bytes, segment counts. tw inspect and qicsilver identify print these. Check the output first: the tape name and the volume descriptions were typed by the tape's owner, so remove them.
• Keep the files in captures/. The repository ignores captures/, and ignores these files wherever they are: *.twrf, *.twti, *.twtz, *.twvl, *.damaged.txt and dump.jsonl. Tar files are not ignored outside captures/, so write them there.
• Never git add -f anything under captures/.
• Tests use synthetic tapes built with qiclib.testing, or a blank factory-formatted tape. Never a real backup.
• Logs can hold names. The tw convert log prints the tape name at the default level, and -v adds file paths and more. Read a log before you attach it.

See also¶

• Read a tape
• Configuration and logging