Reading a DLT IV cartridge in a SDLT tapedrive

[Stumpr2]

SDLT tape drives can read a DLT IV tape cratridge. But, NetBackup will not load a DLT tape into a DLT2 tapedrive. How do you do a restore?

What I tried was to delete the robotic DLT2 (SDLT) and then re-add it as a DLT stand-alone drive. Then I used robtest to honor the pending mount request. Didn't work either.

Further investigation reveals that the following three items should be the same
Media Type
Drive Type
Storage Unit Device
and of course stop/restartMessage was edited by:
Bob Stump

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Can you read tape by tar?
Does Drive Status in vmoprcmd show correct media id?
And, does bptm show any error in logs/bpcd?
Does all log entries show any error(e.g. write protected)?

I have heard someone in my company did catalog import successfuly in such environment. Data media may be OK, also.

[Stumpr2]

After several tries the correct agreement of media/drive/STU was finally met and restores were able to run.

[Daniel_Ryan]

Bob,

Just curious - what has been your experience (and success rate) with reading DLT IV media from SDLT drives. My company has about 15000 DLT IV media tapes and we are looking to go to 9940B. But my problem is going to be reading this media to these drives. We have DLT 7000's now (5 MB/s) and if we do migrate, we will have to include SDLT tape drives to read this media. I was just curious what your experience has been with reading older DLT IV media and how fast you read the data from SDLT drives.

Thanks for your insight,

Dan

[Stumpr2]

I have not gathered any metrics. I do know that if you need to restore legacy data then you should have the appropriate hardware to honor the customer's request. I suggest using the vaulting software to make duplicate copies of the images unto the new tapes at least for the images with a long shelf life remaining. The shorter retention will naturally expire soon and then the tapes can be recycled or sold to a recycler.Message was edited by:
Bob Stump

[Stumpr2]

Someone was asking a similiar question, but I do not remember in what forum.