1

I have old LTO-6 tapes with archival data on them that I wrote years agousing Yosemite Backup. Now I’m setting up an LTO-8 system with different backup software and I want to transfer the archive that I have on the LTO-6 tapes to LTO-8 so that I can get rid of the LTO-6 system altogether. So I want to restore the tapes to disk and then back those up with the new LTO-8 system.

However, I’m running into problems with restoring the LTO-6 tapes. In the Yosemite Restore jobs, I see no way to simply restore all files that are on one tape or a set of tapes - I have to select files and folders that were previously backed up, but I have no way of selecting all files on a tape. I could technically select all files that Yosemite says are restorable and then insert all the tapes on by one, but I don’t have the space for that, so that’s a non-starter. I also tried doing that on a subset of the tapes where I knew roughly what they contained, and it restored a significantly lower volume than what is written on the tapes, so clearly things were on the tapes that were not restored simply by selecting files.

I also tried to use the Copy Media job, in the hopes that I could just copy the files off an entire tape onto a drive. However, this doesn’t seem to be able to copy folders and files, but copies unreadable chunks of equal size onto the disk which appear to match the tape format. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong though.

If I could just see what exactly is on each tape I could use the restore job and manually select the folders that are on there that I want to restore. However, when I import the media to try to view that, “Media Content” won’t reveal what’s on the tape. It seems like that’s because the server that the files were backed up from no longer exists, so Media Content shows the name of the old server and the fact that it is offline, but it reveals nothing of the folder structure that was backed up to tape. So the tape essentially looks empty in that view, even though I know that is not the case because the size indicates something else and I have been able to restore files from said tape, simply not with confidence that I have restored everything.

The UI is horribly unintuitive, the manual is totally unhelpful, and Barracuda seem to have taken down their forum, so I’ve just been trying dozens of different combinations of settings with no real success.

Any input on how I can get these tapes restored would be appreciated.

1 Spice up
2

But I would think that LTO are readable 2 generations down ?

Then backup or archive ? Unless you have archived by backing up and delete, else the data should be still on the current machines ?

Then who or what did you backup ?

3

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately LTO have limited compatibility of their later generations, LTO-8 and LTO-9 only read one generation down.

A lot of what was on tape was deleted on disk, as it was kept for archival purposes. I think I’m just going to restore whatever files I can see were backed up in Yosemite and hope that that’s truly everything that was written to those tapes.

1 Spice up
4

Thats one drawback of using tapes…

Then the other is with software as you may need to “catalog” the tapes again if the DB is lost showhow ?

5

After much searching I finally randomly came across the way to restore all files from a specific tape:

Preparation: Import the media if it isn’t cataloged yet. (Devices → (Select your tape drive) → Right click → Import)

Create a restore job. In the “Selection” section, select all folders. Then go to Filter (at the top) → Media → Add… → Select the tape you want to back up from. It will only select files which exist on that tape.

Note: If restoring to a different location than it was backed up from, select the top most folder in Selection and use Move.