[Help-tar] GNU tar and/on Windows server

[Mike Pepe]

Greetings- I'm not sure if I'm going to find anyone who has tried this, but
I hope someone may have a pointer as to what may be going on.

I'm trying to back up data to a tape drive attached to a Windows 2012
server. When I attempt to do this with the version of tar supplied in
unxutils, I get this error:

C:\temp>tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.12

Copyright (C) 1988, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason.

C:\temp>tar cvf \\.\Tape0 .
tar: Cannot open \\.\Tape0: Invalid argument
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

As an experiment, the tar in Cygwin does actually work:

$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.26
Packaged by Cygwin (1.26-1)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason.

address@hidden ~
$ tar cvf /dev/st0 /cygdrive/c/temp
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/cygdrive/c/temp/
.

In the past, long ago, I did use the "native" tar, and it worked. I've done
quite a bit of searching and haven't come up with another option thus far.
If anyone has any pointers, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

-Mike