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I’m a little confuzzled. I can’t seem to get any info on whether LTO-2 Tape Drives are backwards compatible with its predecessor LTO-1.

Any info would be of great help :slight_smile:

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“The LTO Ultrium compatibility is defined with two concepts demonstrating investment protection: 1) An Ultrium drive can read data from a cartridge in its own generation and two prior generations. 2) An Ultrium drive can write data to a cartridge in its own generation and to a cartridge from the immediate prior generation in the prior generation format.”

From - http://www.ultrium.com/About/faq.html

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Quite an interesting question. The only reference I could find (I started at LTO3 sadly) was this snippet: “LTO-2 Reads and writes Ultrium 1”

This link Seatronics - Acteon hints at the same. So you may be in luck.

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Thanks Guys! Such a fast response too :smiley:

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My understanding is that LTO always tries to read / write the last generation and read only from two generations. A couple of years ago this became a debate as our LTO 2 robot had died and we were debating between lto 3 and lto 4. WIth lto 3 we could still write to our lto 2 tapes but with lto 4 we were stuck with only reading our lto 4 tapes.

In the end we determined that our lto 2 tapes were aging (many were 3 years old) and that it was probably time to move on so we went with LTO 4 and bought new tapes.