When to retire a tape?

[Jon Simon]

How long should I use a tape before retiring it? We have been using the same tapes for about a year now. The Tuesday to Friday tapes are on a two week rotation and the Monday tapes are on a five week rotation.

[Lewis Finch · Accepted solution]

you don't say what kind of tapes you have but maybe this will help.

http://search.hp.com/query.html?charset=iso-8859-1&la=en&hpvc=sitewide&qs=&nh=10&lk=1&rf=0&uf=1&st=1&qt=media+life&submitsearch.x=6&submitsearch.y=8

[Jon Simon]

HP Ultrium LTO 3 800 GB

[Lewis Finch]

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00286108&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[Richard Bickers]

We have some pretty good data in the HP LTO drive and cartridge for this and it's now accessible via HP LTT (our tape diagnostic tool - www.hp.com/support/tapetools).

With LTT, select your drive, pull a support ticket and then view it. Take a look at the cartridge health information. This will tell you how much usage life is left on your tape and also the quality of the data written to it. There's a lot of other useful/interesting information in the ticket too.

You don't even need to put the tape in the drive that wrote it as all this information is held in the memory chip in the tape cartridge itself. Any compatible HP LTO drive will work fine - though only LTO 3 drives can take LTO 3 media...

LTT comes with documentation but feel free to ask if you need any pointers.