Hey,
For the last 3 years we have been using a single LTO4 drive in our company doing nightly full backups. We do a full backup mon-fri on 1 month cycle, then end of month keep that tape for 12 months, and then do a full yearly which we keep for 7yrs according to our company regs.
Anyway, we have been maxing the tape out each night and day (1 job 6pm-6am, another job 8am to 3pm) and with expansion I have had to get an autoloader in place to handle it.
So now we have an LTO5 autoloader. I know that these can read/write LTO4 (thats why i went LTO5), but question would be, would it be OK to mix LTO4 and LTO5 tapes? So for options.
- Leave everything on LTO4 and just buy new LTO4 tapes for them to expand onto
- Replace everything with LTO5 tapes (most expensive but prob best)
- Keep going with LTO4 but load new tapes as needed with LTO5
- Keep one job on LTO4 and use the existing other job tapes as the expansion for that, and replace the other set with LTO5? Half my initial cost of tapes then?
Just looking for suggestions really?
Thx,
Andy