Discuss how an operating syste

Since this tape technology is append-only, all the free space is at the end of the tape. The location of this free space does not need to be stored at all, because the space command can be used to position to the EOT mark. The amount of available free space after the EOT mark can be represented by a single number. It may be desirable to maintain a second number to represent the amount of space occupied by files that have been logically deleted (but their space has not been reclaimed since the tape is append-only) so that we can decide when it would pay to copy the nondeleted files to a new tape in order to reclaim the old tape for reuse. We can store the free and deleted space numbers on disk for easy access. Another copy of these numbers can be stored at the end of the tape as the last data block. We can overwrite this last data block when we allocate new storage on the tape.