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This will be a very newbie question regarding backups, I guess.

My company has LTO-5 tapes that were written by a Tandberg drive. Now that it’s dead and out of warranty, we’re looking at our options.

1)Will another brand of tape drive be able to read LTO-5 tapes we currently have stored?

2)Is LTO only a tape form factor standard? Or is it also a R/W standard?

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Been a while, but if memory serves, it’s the software that matters. Any LTO-5 drive will be fine as long as you use the same software to access the old data.

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As Larry said, your primary issue is the software.

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Exactly, the same would go for an LTO-6 drive (it will read and write your LTO-5 tapes)

I’d take this time to re-evaluate your needs and either invest in LTO-6 or a Disk based solution since drives aren’t cheap. If you’re in a rush, or you just want something to hold you over I’d try and source a refub drive.

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You should be okay as long as it’s the same software as mentioned above.

With LTO in general, you should be able to read/write one generation down and read two down. LTO-5 should be able read and write to LTO-4 and read LTO-3. It can’t do anything with LTO-3 and below. ← assuming the same software of course.

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LTO Standards are One generation backward compatible In R/W and Two Generation in Read only.

Your LTO-5 Drive can read/write LTO-5 & LTO - 4 and Only Read LTO-3.

You can use any company’s Drive which supports LTO standard which is an Open Standard.

The Other Standard that was previously used was DLT, you won’t find them much due to small capacity but they have more life span than LTO.

*I have worked with all these…from LTO-2 to LTO- 6 and even DLT feels like being in stone age.

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DLT wasn’t that long ago. Was it? Maybe I’m just old. QIC was a long time ago.

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As per wikipedia.

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In February 2007, Quantum stopped developing the next generations of DLT drives (S5 and V5) after insufficient market acceptance of the S4 and V4 drives, shifting its drive strategy to LTO.

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See? 2007 isn’t that long ago.

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I concur with the other posters. The nice thing is that LTO is actually a tape standard that is administered in an open way. (You can read about it here .) Because of this, all LTO tapes and drives should be compatible and so you should be able to read your Tandberg LTO-5 tapes in any other vendor’s LTO drives. (This is also why @techyogi is correct in stating that LTO drives R/W one generation back and read two generations back because this requirement is part of the LTO standard.)

As others have pointed out, the challenge is really the software and so while the hardware is compatible, the software usually isn’t. For example, a tape written by EMC NetWorker cannot typically read by Symantec NetBackup and vice versa.

I also love the discussions of older tape technologies because it brings back fond memories. About 15 years ago, I worked for a reseller and our thing was Sony AIT tape. Anyone remember that? At the time, we swore it was the best thing since sliced bread and that it was far superior to LTO.

I also used to have a QIC tape drive for home use. It was painfully slow and unreliable. However, it seemed way cool at the time. My other favorite thing was my Iomega Zip drive.

Edit: fixed typos

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Sure, I remember AIT. And Betamax and LaserDisc :slight_smile:

I had a QIC drive at home too, an external from Microsolutions. I remember when they released a parallel port hard drive - amazing thing, let me backup stuff from any PC as long as I ran their program to do it. Of course, ZIP drives came out soon after and it wasn’t as big of a deal anymore. I have to admit, though, I preferred the Imation LS120 drives to ZIP.

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Awesome! Thanks everyone for replying to me. We were all tape backup until I convinced my boss to replace one of the units with a SAN. We were doing dailies on drives and the monthly and yearlies on tape until the Tandberg died. I really want to get rid of tapes entirely… but we still have to have a drive to restore the current tapes from. :frowning: Now the next question we’ll have to tackle is what cost effective way is there to do long term backups. But I’ll reserve that for another post. Thanks everyone again for clearing this up for me!

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How does that get your data off site? That was always one of the big reasons for tape - portability. The other was long term storage, keeping yearly backups. You are doing that on the SAN now?

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To answer your question LarryG, monthlies and yearlies are in a fireproof and waterproof safe. So, yes it’s not exactly off site and not ideal. Hopefully, we can move this entire backup procedure to the cloud because I find this entire tape backup a bit archaic. I’d also like to see it duplicated to storage in some of our regional offices. Basically it’s a work in progress LarryG. :frowning:

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Yeah, I hear you. A lot of places still use it though, because it does have some advantages. I finally went to archiving off to external HDs, last year. They are nice and portable so can be taken off site. We rotate through them and have multiples, so if one dies it’s not a serious problem.

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I have a old publishers data archived in two of such sony tapes and has per label they are some 10-12 years old and they must be kept in safe till next 20 years as per compliance.

Though we never tried to recover from that but it has been kept in a safe locker.