Re: BitCalm Gone Bye Bye?
"made a curious typo in his backup and restore script."
Probably mistyped the device filename, e.g. /dev/rnt instead of /dev/rmt on a unix server which used static device file entries rather than a devfs.
If the device filename doesn't exist, an ordinary file is created on the filesystem instead!
I used to find loads of those around servers I helped manage - people doing manual writes to export data from one location to another (back then, tapes were more viable than their network!) - presumably by the time they discovered the tape was blank, they repeated the task, not realising what had caused the original problem, and therefore not tidying up after themselves.