tar and the braindead man

[Anthony Landreneau <landrena@idsno.com>]

Greetings,
	Got what I thought was a simple problem. I have a 2GB DAT tape drive, a
directory that I want to backup to that tape drive.  Seems simple enough,
but I can't seem to get it to work. I thought the command was:
tar -cvf thetarfile.tar /usr/thedirectory

But it isn't working.  Now I have created a tar file on the hard drive, and
thought it would be just as easy to move the file to tape, but I can't
figure that out either.  Tried mounting the tape drive and the machine
mocks me openly.  Any and all help would be apprciated!

Anthony.