Check with the hardware vendor for drivers compatibility.

What do you mean when you say lto2 tapes recognized as lto3. You can use them for read/write on lto3 drives but they remain lto2 tapes only.

ok, let me elaborate a little bit more.

our current version of networker is 7.0. this version only supports up to lto2 tapes and drives.

we installed a virtual tape library emulating lto3 tape drives and lto3 tapes. since our current version (7.0) only supports up to lto2, we used it.

now, its time to upgrade to 7.3.2 which uses lto3 drivers.

- will i be able to read the previous lto3 tapes (which used lto2 drivers) as lto3?
- will it remain to be lto2? if it does remain to lto2, is there a way for me to be able to use them using lto3 drivers?

thanks

your recommendation sounds good, i will validate your suggestion once i have upgraded our server. i'll keep things posted

You should be able to read it. In media db they will remain marked as lto2 until next label operation. Having those tapes as lto2 or lto3 won't change much (only thing is that it uses different block size), but it is good that you moved away from 7.0.

To have devices changed now to lto3 you will need to rerun jbconfig first. Automatic relabeling might fail (actually you won't see failure but rather NW won't relabel it automatically) thus once the tape is recycled have it relabeled manually. After that you will see tape marked as lto3.

hi,

hrvoje is correct, networker "only" uses the device type to select between which tapes can be mounted on which volumes, except for file and adv_file of course. It will mount an LTO types volume on an LTO2 drive but not vice versa. Setting the volume type is done when labeling a volume.
If you label a LTO1 tape in a drive which you have configured to be LTO2, networker will mark that volume as media type LTO2. After this it will not automatically load this volume into an LTO1 drive. You will need to relabel this volume manually on an LTO1 drive to have networker set its media type to LTO1.

As long as your OS supports LTO3 the drive will be written correctly and you can restore this data. Networker stores it's backup data in the OTF (open tape format) so that it can always recover the data.

regards,

Xander

will i be able to recover those written in the tapes tagged as lto2 in the lto3 drives?

my plan is, after performing the upgrade and relabeling new tapes, i'll just stage those written in the "tagged as lto2 tapes" to those tagged as lto3

thanks,

Yes.