Anyone used PrimoCache alongside LTO LTFS tape restore?

[Axel Mertes]

Hi All,

I have to restore some older LTO LTFS tapes. However, these have been used by simply copying thousands of small files onto the tapes, which turns out to be extremely inefficient on the restores, especially on Windows 11. We found that realtime security must be switch off in OS, otherwise Windows 11 will force the LTO drive to rewind after every file to the index partition of the LTO LTFS tape, check something in the index (file table, so to say) and then move on with the next file.

However, I still see excessive amounts of rewinds. Newer tapes have been written using large ZIP or 7z archives, which makes restoring them so much faster (these ZIPs are not compressed, just containers).

As I need this only for restore, it would be very helpful if PrimoCache could be used to cache this part of the tape, because then the rewinds must not be done I hope and the data is pulled from cache.

I wonder if anyone every tried that before and has some real world experience he/she could share?

Cheers,
Axel

[tverweij]

I do not think Primocache is the right tool for this.
Look at Starwind Software and the lto-p2v-conversion where you can create virtual tapes from LTO.
Maybe that will solve your problem.