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Questions tagged [lto]

Linear Tape Open is a family of tape specifications ranging from 100 GB (LTO-1) to 12 TB (LTO-8).

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Determining LTO Cleaning Tape Expiration?

I have some LTO tape drives, and use cleaning tapes as required, but the lifetime of the cleaning tapes is not as predictable as I would have expected. I'm looking for a way to query the system, whether it be the robot (Quantum i6000) or Veritas…
Tim S.
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Determine remaining capacity of LTO tape

How can I determine how much space is remaining on an LTO tape? If I seek to the end and check the status, I can see I am on file number 17, but what I do not know is how large each file was. $ mt -f /dev/nst1 eod $ mt -f /dev/nst1 status SCSI 2…
Matt Clark
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Do LTO tapes have spare/unused capacity?

As I understand it, LTO tapes write data in "wraps", where the first wrap unspools the tape into the drive, and the second wrap spools it back into the cartridge. This process is repeated a number of times, with the idea being that once the end of…
Malvineous
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How Serviceable are Tape Drives?

I'm contemplating an auto-loading tape drive as part of a backup strategy. This would be my first experience with tape backup. The cost-effectiveness of tape drives seems to depend on the assumption that they will provide many years of service. …
alx9r
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Difference between LTO half-height and full-height drives?

I've noticed that most tape drive vendors provide two options: full-height or half-height. The half-height drives are physically smaller and less expensive, yet seem to have identical specifications compared to their full-height peers. What is the…
Nic
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What does it mean, if all LEDs of an LTO-6 drive are flashing?

All LEDs of an half height LTO-6 drive are flashing with ~ 4 Hz. An LTO-5 tape is still inside, the drive does not react on commands, the flashing continues after a power cycle. I could not find the error code in the Tandberg manual. The drive is…
Jonas Stein
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LTO 5 tape rotation best practices - Lifetime

What is the general best practice for keeping LTO 5 tapes in a rotation? I have read that they have archival capability of 30 years, but I am sure this really depends on how much you're reading and writing to them during their service period, how…
JoshODBrown
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Pre-labelled LTO-6/LTFS tape numbers- Are the tape numbers stored somewhere on the tape?

I have some Fujifilm LTO-6 tapes which come labelled with tape numbers. I'm writing a script and I would like to assign a variable from the tape number. Is this information stored anywhere on the tape? If it's not I'll just have to create a variable…
neilH
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What could cause an LTO drive to write at half its capacity?

I have an LTO4 drive that when given even new LTO4 tapes, only writes around 460GiB to the tape even though the tape's uncompressed capacity is supposed to be 800GB. I have noticed that in one direction the drive writes close to the stated 80MB/sec,…
Malvineous
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LTO-8 tapes long-term storage rules

I have a bunch of tapes LTO-8 written in LTFS by HPE tape-drive. I can not find any rules for reliable physical storage for the tapes. I have an anti-magnetic case for them, but maybe there are some other rules? Should I rewind them in some period…
Oleg Borisenko
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Tape backup software for putting multiple backup sets on one tape

I'm currently trying to install a new tape backup environment (LTO 7, hardware is already set up). As LTO 7 tapes provide a LOT of data space (6/15TB per tape), and the backups that need to be stored on tape will not exceed 0.5TB per day, it would…
Daniel
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What kind of algorithm is used in LTO tape hardware compression?

LTO tape drives, from their very first generation, offer hardware compression that, theoretically, allows a maximum of 2 - 2.5x the rated data capacity of each cartridge to be stored, with only a slight penalty to read/write rates. I'm having…
Mikey T.K.
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Are LTO Hardware compression and encryption standardized?

I'm about to setup a backup using an LTO-4 Drive. I know that drives are meant to be compatible to any tape within the past 3 generations (so I should be able to read an LTO-4 tape using an LTO-4, 5 or 6 drive). I wonder if this also applies to…
Michael Stum
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What could cause a 'sense error' when setting LTO encryption?

I'm trying to set an encryption key on an LTO-4 drive under Linux. I successfully did this once, power cycled the drive, and now I cannot get the drive to accept the key again. The command I am using is this: $ stenc -f /dev/nst0 -a 1 -e on -k…
Malvineous
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Fibre channel: LTO tape overwritten on bus reset

There is a situation that we had at out customer that I'd like to understand better. Here's what happened: A library with LTO tape drives is connected to a fibre channel environment Archiving software running on Windows server 2008 is writing data…
matejk
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