LTO Ultrium backward compatibility within NetWorker

Question

Customer was running an LTO-2 tape library and now has a collection of tape volumes of NetWorker "media type" = LTO Ultrium 2

Tape Library has now been upgraded to LTO-4 tape drives and reconfigured. All new tapes now being labelled are of NetWorker "media type" = LTO Ultrium 4.

Problem occurs when the customer wants to recover from an old tape in the new library.

The old tapes would be physically readable in the new tape drives, because LTO-4 devices are backward compatible with LTO-3 and LTO-2 cartridges.

However, NW refuses to attempt to mount an LTO-2 tape in the LTO-4 tape drives.

I assume this is because they are different " media types" and NW does not understand the concept of backward compatibility.

Is there any way to fix this ?

I assume that if one could modify all the volume records for the old tapes in the media DB and change the " media type" to LTO Ultrium-4, this problem would be resolved.

Does anyone know how to do this ?

Thanks
John Hope-Bailie

ble1 · Answer

If this would be really the issue with media type then EMC would need to fix it thus the best bet is support case. This is not new and EMC should be aware of it - same happened to people who would use LTO3, but it was configured as LTO2. NW would not automatically relabel LTO2 until you would not label it (and thus mark it as LTO3 media). I never paid attention back then what was the issue as workaround was simple, but here we have now different story.

When you say NW refuses to mount, can you tell me what happens when you manually try to mount the requested tape?

NetWorker

LTO Ultrium backward compatibility within NetWorker

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