Okay, before you flame me and tell me to pipe it through a symmetric cipher filter, hear me out. Tape handling is hairy, depending on what kind of functionality you want. A regular filter may write(2) in strangely sized blocks, not working very well with your tape drive. Mostly though, things get difficult when you have to/want to deal with multiple tapes. Although I could probably hack up "catblock" to do the job, and use a line of the form dump -0uBf ... | symmetric_cipher | catblock blockfactor > /dev/tape if there exists something which already does this job, or something like it, I'd like to know. Now that I think about it, maybe this is the cleanest way. PS: If there is a place where I can get reviews of the crypto software that is out there, that'd be fab because csua just has a TON of stuff! The "security-faq" is pretty good -- I want more! :) Keep codin'