MSL4048 Cannot Restore Older Media

[TheJuiceman]

We have a MSL4048 with dual FC LTO4 drives. We are using Data Protector 5.5, all of which are on a 11.23 system.

I have a two fold problem....
1.) We cannot restore older media on the drives. We have LTO1 and LTO2 tapes that the drives will not read. I thought these were backward compatible???

2.) The autochanger seems to take FOREVER to scan the media and load whenever a restore, backup, or media scan is initiated (that is vs. a MSL6000). Is this typical?

Thanks

[Marino Meloni_1 · Accepted solution]

1)- the backward compatibility is only two generation, so the LTO2 cartridge should be recognized by the backup application from the LTO4 if you are using the same backup application used to write the data http://www.hptapecompat.com/

2)- probably you do not have the barcodes on the cartridges, then every inventory go through the load/unload of each cartridge

[TheJuiceman]

Thank you for the response and the link. We do have the LTO2 tapes barcoded and the autochanger does read them when a scan is done. However, Data Protector fails when a restore is attempted. I see in the support matrix that LTO2 should be read compable. Any ideas why would be having this problem? Thanks again for your help!!!

[Eric de Lange (MSE)]

Juiceman,

What exact error does the restore fail with ?
Is there any events logged in the debug.log for the time of the failure ?

Also,
Did you install the patches (OS and DP) required for LTO4 support ?

lastly.
Does a test backup/restore with LTO4 media work ?

A lot of questions, I know, but sometimes very neccesary unfortunately.

[TheJuiceman]

The problem seems to have self corrected. I have no idea why. Thank you all for the help.