• Storage & Archiving

  A New LTFS Data Loss Possibility Just Announced

  Posted by Tim Jones on March 12, 2014 at 7:13 pm

  Hi Folks,

  We’ve just received notice from the LTO vendors and verified in our labs that there is a potential data loss situation if you are writing LTO-5 LTFS tapes in an LTO-6 drive. If you fill the LTO-5 tape, you can be left with a tape that will not properly unmount / eject and may not be recoverable for remounting afterwards – even when using the “ltfsck deepscan” option.

  This affects LTFS operations under OS X, Windows, and Linux. You may see an error in your system logs that looks like this:

  LTFS11033E cannot unmount: failed to write an index.

  If you are writing to LTO-5 tapes in an LTO-6 drive, it is recommended that you leave a minimum of 20GB of free space on the tape to insure that the unmount properly updates the index data on the index partition.

  If you are writing LTO-5 LTFS tapes in an LTO-5 drive, this does not affect your tape use.

  While we have tested with the HP variants, we have no reason to believe that this doesn’t also affect IBM drives.

  This does not affect tapes written using BRU or TAR formats.

  Tim
  —
  Tim Jones
  CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
  https://www.productionbackup.com
  BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

  Tim Jones replied 12 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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