Reading LTO2 tapes in LTO4 drives

[RoddersB]

Hi,

Can someone please advised me whether Backup Exec can read LTO2 tapes on an LTO4 tape drive ?

I can see from the technical specs that I should be able to read two versions below but I am having limited success. Catalogues either don't run at all saying that I must clean the tape heads or misrepresent the catalogue and it is not possible to restore from it as the catalogue is partially missing. I know that the LTO4 drives in question (I have tried two) are all working fine as they have done nightly backup without any issues for the last six months. If I take the LTO2 tapes and put them in an LTO2 drive for restore they are fine. All of the drives in question are HP Autoloaders. I have also changed the setting to use storage based catalogs but has no effect.

The reason I am asking is that we are gradually moving to LTO4 drives and I do not want to lose ability to restore LTO2 tape data.

Can anyone advise on the best way forward ? Current version is Backup Exec 2010R2 with all service packs and patches applied. Am I missing some configuration settings that have to be applied to "dumb down" Backup Exec to be able to read LTO2 tapes ?

Any help gratefully received.

Brian.

[samueljn]

As you have mentioned and as per the hardware specifications you should be able to read two versions behind.

As mentioned in the following article: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH137615

Provide us the exact error message you get when doing an Inventory and Catalog so that we can identify the issue.

[Lesta_G]

I would put the LTO2 tape drive onto the same media server as the LTO4 and duplicate the LTO2 tape to an LTO4

If the LTO2 tape's data are a few years old then this is also good to a) confirm the data is readable and b) puts the data onto a tape type that is more easily supported in the years to come

One other thing I thought of was to change the LTO4 tape device properties (in terms of block size etc) to match the LTO2 to see if the tape is "more" readable? (just something I remember from a pkh blog about fine tuning a LTO5 device and if you backup using a specific device configuration, you need to restore using a device with the same config...... this may or may not be valid in your case)

[pkh]

The ability to read a tape is more hardware-related than software.  BE will just issue the read command to the tape drive which does the actual reading.

The only setting in BE that I can think off which will affect tape reading is barcode rule.  If you are using barcode and barcode rules, the barcode rules should say that LTO2 tapes can be read, but not written, by LTO4 drives.

[RoddersB]

Thanks very much for the replies, as requested here are the errors ;

Inventory always runs fine but a catalogue gives a selection of the following errors depending on the tape inserted ;

0xE00084EC - a backup storage read/write error failed

0xE00084C7 - a backup storage read/write error failed

0xe0000900 - the requested media is not listed in the meda index (reinventorying and recataloging gives the same error).

Thanks as always for your attention and advice !