Goodday, I have never cleaned the servers at my work but they are now running 5 times a week for 5 years. Now they asked me to clean it with the tape that has come with it. My qeustion is how do you clean it? Just put the tape in but then what? Hope someone gives me an answer.
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I'm prepared to bet the "clean drive" lights have been on for years but ignored as being "normal". – John Gardeniers Feb 01 '10 at 20:50
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If this is for cleaning the tape drive, then you just need to put a cleaning tape in the drive, and it will automatically start a cleaning cycle.
The drive will eject the cleaning tape once it's done a cleaning cycle.
James
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You just put the tape in until it either finishes or ejects.
You really should have been doing this regularly.
Chopper3
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As others have stated, just put the cleaning tape in and wait until it ejects.
If you haven't cleaned the drive for 5 years, you really, really need to check your backups and make sure they're readable. If I'd walked into this situation, I'd check at least a couple of tapes (depends on the backup schedule) and make sure I couple restore everything, and then test restoring something off of all the other active tapes.
Ward - Reinstate Monica
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LTO recommendation are not the preventive cleaning that was needed with older drive like DLT.
It's an "on demand" cleaning. You put the cleaning tape in the drive, the drive clean itself, then eject the cleaning tape... job done.
With LTO drive, when you put the cleaning tape in a drive which doesn't need it, the drive ejects the tape immediately. But some decreases the number of cleaning left, even it doesn't use it. A cleaning tape with an number of cleaning left null is ejected immediately. So you may have some cleaning tape unusable, even if no drive ever load the tape.
Kamy
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Not strictly true. Some of the newer HP LTO drives will do an on-demand cleaning every time you put in a cleaning tape. However, the point about only cleaning LTO drives when they actually need it is very, very true. – sysadmin1138 Apr 20 '10 at 15:33