Sync to HP Ultrium

[Andre]

Good morning,

I have searched for a utility to assist with a problem we are having with no success.

I am using an HP Ultrium LTO 7 tape drive. The tape drive uses LTFS file system making it mountable and visible as a local disk drive so you can interact with the tape like a normal drive. The HP software utility formats and mounts the tape as a local drive.

There is a problem copying to it. The tape is capable of storing up to 15TB depending on the content of the data stored. When the tape is formatted it shows a usable capacity of 5.21TB. This capacity, however, is not a true reflection of the potential capacity, but the final usable capacity is not known.

The data compression happens in realtime on the tape drive as hardware compression. So, as the data is written to the tape the data is compressed but there is no way of knowing beforehand how good the compression will be and what the true final capacity will be.

So currently I can copy for example 10TB to tape and it will succeed by ignoring the free space check before the copy starts with FreeFileSync, but the next 10TB to another tape might fail because of the data content not compressing well.

My suggestion for a feature will be to have the software periodically check free space as the copy is happening and once the free space available is less than a specified value, it pauses the copy and I am presented with an option to insert another tape using the same drive letter or maybe specify another drive letter?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Thanks,

André

[xCSxXenon]

That is such a niche scenario... What happens when you run out of space on the tape? Doesn't it just give you an error and pause the transfer, then gives you options to retry, skip, cancel, etc.?