best way to get data from LTO2 tape to LTO5 tape

[rpatty]

We have a lot of very old backups on LTO2 tape, from our old backup system that's close to being retired. That system has been running Backup Exec 11d.

Our new tape system has an LTO5-compatible tape drive, which of course can't read old LTO2 tapes. The new systems have Backup Exec 2010 running on them.

We're trying to figure out the best way to migrate data from the old tapes to the new system, so they'll continue to be readable in the future. Are there any suggestions on the best way to migrate that data?

I've seen some suggestions for thinks like duplicating a job from tape to disk, and then duplicating it back to tape, but that seems to be causing problems: the duplicate to disk puts everything into .bak files, and then if I pull them into tape on the new server, the catalog only sees the .bak files and doesn't know anything about the original servers/data anymore. Is part of the problem that the old Backup Exec and the new Backup Exec aren't talking to each other or sharing catalog files?

Maybe the answer is I should try to attach the old tape drive to the new server, and then keep all the work inside a single server, perhaps even going directly from tape to tape? I don't think we've got the right physical connectors for that, but maybe that's an easier problem to solve.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Ken_Putnam · Accepted solution]

You need to duplicate each old tape to a new one.  You can even append more than one to take advantage of the larger capacity of the new tapes

(You will need to keep the LTO2 drive connected to the newn media server until this process is completed, since the Dupkicate jobs should be Tape to Tape)

[Amarnath_Sathis]

1 LTO5(1.5TB) = 7 LTO2(1.4TB) - 200GB * 7 

But duplicating backup images from Old L2 tapes to L5 tapes may take much time.

And this looks like a unwanted thing.

Because after some years you will again migrate LTO3 & LTO4 version tapes to newer and upcoming versions line LTO5, LTO6 & LTO7 etc.,

Instead you segregate the data based on Mission Critical, Production and Development.

Migrate only Mission Critical and Important production backup's to new versions. Instead of going for all.

[rpatty]

Okay, I think that's making sense. Both drives attached to one server for direct tape-to-tape migration. I agree we're hoping to consolidate lots of old tapes into a much smaller number of new tapes.

@Amarnath: good point. I'll be filtering through that old stuff (some of it going back to 2004) and trying to only keep the pieces that are important data, and excluding things (like old domain controller backups) that we would never want to restore now, and probably couldn't even if we thought we wanted to.

Thanks.