A therefore means: A tar archive that was originally written to magnetic tape using a dump -style or tar -to-tape process, and later extracted (dumped back) from the tape into a single compressed archive file on disk.
A common confusion arises when a user encounters a tape dump containing multiple tape marks. A raw tape image might look like this: tape dumped tarball
While most production backups now use disk-to-disk or cloud, (LTO-9 tapes hold 18 TB native). The concept of a “tape dumped tarball” persists in: A therefore means: A tar archive that was