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Hello,

I’ve been tasked with converting old tape backups that are sitting on our old LT03 tape drives to our more current LT07 drives. Are there any desktop converters or cloning devices that can be used for this? Im open to any suggestions.

Thank you,

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What kind of backup software was used to write the tapes? Your answer will depend on what kind of catalog you use.

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BackupExec

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LTO can only read its own generation and two levels back, so for you that means 7, 6 & 5

Are you saying you have replaced the LTO 3 drives completely?

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More than likely you will have to first restore the data to a temp location and then back them up to new tapes. Toby is correct. You will probably will need to do this with two tape units. You might be able to find a company that specializes in this to do it for you.

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We still have both the lto3 and 7 device. But it’s at another site, and I was trying to avoid going over the EPL. Im most likely going to just bring the lto3 reader to our headquarters since I won’t need it on site until the end of the year.

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Your best bet is to keep those backups on the existing LTO-3 tapes until they’re disposed of according to your organization’s data retention policies. If you want spare drives, buy a couple of LTO-5 drives, which are newer but still can read LTO-3.

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This this and more this… Tape backups and their hardware should always be retired when the retention policy for the data they cover expires.

Example: You used the LTO3 until 2016, and they contain data with a 7 year retention period. You would keep the hardware, tapes and backup software around until 2023.

Your alternative is to restore and re-backup which is an enormous waste of time. With that said we have a tech where I am currently working who spends half his day doing this kind of work. Apparently the company is really worried about those 4 year old SQL backups…

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What is your retention policy, by the way? Will it ever expire?

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That’s a good idea actually. + unless there are regulatory requirements you’d better replace physical tapes with either spinning disk or public cloud (tape-in-cloud actually).

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Here is a service to migrate the tape data to S3 if you want: https://www.tapeark.com/

Otherwise you need a LTO5 drive and LTO5 tapes as a middle ground if you want to convert without restoring the data and backing it up again.

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I think using the LTO5 as a middle ground is a good idea as well. Ill look into the possibilities of doing this.

Thank you,

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I think I read somewhere that with LTO-8 it only can read back to LTO-7. Not certain of that… but since we’re not talking LTO-8 here, not specifically relevant. But raising it for those that might be looking at it. I’ll see if I can get the “certain” answer WRT LTO-8.

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I can confirm what I suspected: The two generations of backward compatibility was broken for LTO-8 because LTO-8 drives relies (sic) entirely on Barium Ferrite tape media. Since LTO-6 supported both magnetic particle and Barium Ferrite, the compatibility issues has (sic) arisen. via Smart Migration Options for Aging LTO Archives - StorageDNA

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I believe it might have been easier to manage all that stuff with virtualized tapes. In fact, that allows avoiding hardware tape drives at all and you remain with simple-to-handle HDDs/SSDs. Basically, it could be some software like StarWind VTL , or even offloading the tapes to the cloud storage with Cloud VTL to make things even more reliable in terms of storing the backups.

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