Drive Letter For Tape Drive

[Wesley Belk]

I am using a 15/30 GB DLT tape drive in Windows XP Pro. I have the drive configured correctly under device manager and the backup software can use the drive. I am looking for some software that will assign the tape drive a drive letter and allow me to save to the tape drive like an extra drive. Any help or suggestions is apreciated.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Did not hear about if this software exists. Tape devices and sequential access devices used for long-term backup storage and it's not convenient to use it as hard disk. Better buy hard disk :o) So another algorythms used to access tapes, different vendors use different ones and different tape layout (only 'tar' the same through all the systems).
Please use backup application to back up your data
Eugeny

[Michael Lampi]

The closest thing that comes to mind is HSM (heirarchical storage manager) software. Your data is cached on a disk, and when storage utilization or last modified date thresholds are exceeded the file(s) are moved to tape, leaving behind a pointer.

Most of this sort of software requires a tape library/jukebox of some sort, not just a single drive.

Such software is available from various different vendors (e.g., Veritas, ADIC, Legato), all to fit your budget (or not!).

[Dave LaRose]

Seagate had a product that performed very well a few years back, but support was dropped after Windows 98.

I too am looking for similar functionality to dump files to tape.

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
We might have just a misunderstanding of the technical kind.
A tape drive is a sequential data storage device. That means, one byte saved after another.
A disk drive is a direkt access device, where you can store data in any order on blocks with a direkt address.
So storing data on a tape directly like to a disk drive is not possible.
Today tapes are no more used for sequential access in software like it was years ago on mainfarme computers for sort runs etc.
Nowadays they are only used for backup.
There is a chance to program something like this special access you need, but i really doubt that there is any software on the market.
If there is, please send me some info, because i would be really interested in it.
Thank you and kind regards
Alexander M. Ermes

[Dave LaRose]

Alexander,

Although your understanding of the manner in which a tape drive works is correct, there have been software offerings that establish a drive letter for the tape drive. The tape receives a special 'format' and files can be dragged and dropped to this 'drive letter'. The tape drive still functions in the normal manner, but the user has a clean comprehensible interface to dump files to tape. Additionally, the product Seagate had was very fast, and if one were to open a video file on the tape (double click for example), it would actually read and play as if it were on a hard drive... with the exception of the seek time to get to the file in the first place. Clearly the better the hardware, the better this performance was.

Tapedisk was another product, which apparently stopped development at the windows 95 stage.

Hope that helps ;-)

-Dave

[Marino Meloni_1]

If I remember well, Replica has the possibility to "mount"the tape after backup so that you could recall a file from it like from a disk, and assign also a letter to this tape.
marino

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
Dave, thanks for bringing a dinosaur like me
up to date.
;-)
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Carlchen Clever]

I found the link to a software called "Tape-it" (Win 9x) at:
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/tape/9tiuse.html
and the download at:
http://www.seagate.com/support/tape/utils/tapeit.html
for special "Seagate drives"

[Karosa Alabaster]

I don't know about the 15/30gig model, I have an old 2/4 gig DDS-1 drive, and I am using Iomega Flash!File for this.. It's the complete solution. It comes with the Ditto drivers download http://download.iomega.com/english/ditto98.exe
Install it, after the installation of Iomega Backup, You'll find a directory named DTA in the folder you installed it into. Run setup.exe from that directory that is the Flash!File installer.

[Yong Sun]

1Safe from 1Vision supports drive letter access
http://www.the1vision.com/products/1safe/
Here is a list of supported tape drives:
http://www.the1vision.com/products/1safe/drive_support.php

[Rich Fournier]

In 1997 Seagate produced DTA (Direct Tape Access) Software. It was $79.00 per copy and your Travan / Jumbo tape drive acted like a hard drive but slower.

HP also sold a condensed version of Seagate DTA for $29.00/copy.

It was a roll of the dice when you loaded the HP Version to see if it would delete all the icons from your desktop or some other malady.

The Seagate $79.00 version worked without a flaw.

I would like to find some software that I could access an LTO tape drive in such a manner

[sspadmin]

I found a very informative article here. http://techfreakindia.blogspot.com/2011/06/drive-letter-to-tape-drive-how-to_9404.html

[Marino Meloni_1]

This is a new technology only available starting with LTO5