Category: LTO tape

LTO software

As I mentioned in an older post about storage alternatives, I’ve been running YoYotta to back up to LTO tape, but for a while now, I’ve been looking for alternatives.

Don’t get me wrong, YoYotta is an excellent piece of software, very solid and has a million features for managing huge libraries of video material. But for several reasons, I can’t use 80% of what YoYotta is best at.

For instance, it’s fantastic for locating and collating video material for reuse, but first of all that’s not what we do, and secondly that doesn’t work for ScreenFlow files since they’re proprietary and YoYotta can’t decode them. So I’ve been using only the LTFS part of YoYotta and for my use it is lacking a number of features I’d love to have.

On top of that, they switched from a “buy it once” model to a yearly subscription recently and even reading old tapes is not enabled without an ongoing subscription1 So this makes it slightly iffy to ensure recovery over the long term. Not to speak of the MacOS support for SAS adapters and stuff like that.

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LTO tape error rates

I have always wondered what the normal error rates are on LTO tapes. Now I know, or at least I know what the error rates are for the tapes I have.

The 51 LTO-8 tapes I have in my pool have an average of 1.1 recoverable errors (read and write) per TiB read and written. But even though I only buy HPE tapes, the green Q2078A ones, I know they more or less randomly actually come from either Sony or Fujifilm, the only two manufacturers of LTO tapes in the world. You can’t make it out by looking at the cartridge, but the built-in EEPROM in the cartridge holds that information, such as manufacturer, date of manufacture, lot id, total bytes read and written (lifetime) and six types of errors, also lifetime scoped. With a bit of software, you can get all that data from the tape cartridges.

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