Tape Drives, Libraries and Autoloaders

Hewlett Packard and Quantum LTO internal and external tape backup drives. LTO (Linear Tape Open, the most popular backup tape technology in use today. LTO 6 drives and tapes offer storage capacities up to 3TB native and up to 6.25TB compressed. LTO tape drive use industry standard back-up software or can be accessed using LTFS.

Tape Autoloaders and Tape Libraries. Both Tape Autoloaders and Tape Libraries consist of a tape drive, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader and a robotic arm to load and unload tapes. A Tape Autoloader has only one tape drive. Tape Libraries are more sophisticated and have (or has capacity for) two or more tape drives.

LTFS  - A new feature starting with LTO-5, and all higher generation tape drives, is Linear Tape File System (LTFS).  LTFS allows you to use the tape almost as if it were a USB drive or external hard disk. You can drag and drop files from your server to the tape, see the list of saved files using a standard operating system directory, and use point and click to restore. To implement this feature, all you need to download and install LTFS software on your host machine.