How to mount a LTO tape-drive??

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Hi folks,
I was wondering if there's a possibility to mount a LTO-drive like a removable hard drive?
I'm only using it with my Retrospect backup software but now I need to open different tapes directly.

I'm thankful for every information.

BR,
Eric
 
Tape drives cannot be "mounted" like regular hard drives. Tape drives are sequential storage devices, meaning it's near impossible to be able to "mount" a tape drive and browse it.

You'll need to use the software that originally created the data on the tapes to "browse" the data on the tapes.
 
thanks,
that's what I thought. But my client how gave me a LTO tape told me about some kind of a javascript which is able to browse a LTO tape like a finder-window.
Do you know anything about that?
 
I have not heard anything about a Javascript-based tape drive browser, nor could I find any reference to it with a little Googling.

I can see how this may be possible -- or may seem possible: perhaps the Javascript was actually browsing the tape catalog file (basically an index of all files located on the tape), and not the actual tape drive itself.

Can your client provide a link where he/she found the Javascript tape browser script?
 
I have an Exabyte VXA2 drive on firewire. In the past I have written tapes only through my backup software, BRU. I stopped paying annual support about 2 years ago because it had become too pricey for my circumstances - and my installed version has begun to exhibit flakiness under Snow Leopard.

Further, I dimly recall hearing, I forget the source, that OSX has never had any device-level support for tapes. Be that as it may, ...

How can I write tapes, and read them back, using "free" tools? I am not afraid of the command line.
 
Did you find anything? My situation is the following, in case somebody knows how to help me:

I have an iMac 10.4.11 and I need to recover LTO3 data. The thing is I don't know which software they used to backup and I don't have access to this information. I'm using HP StorageWords 1840 (with a scsi/firewire converter) to read the tape and I've installed BRU LE (Evaluation Edition) to try to read it. But I get this message:

"BRU was unable to read the contents of the current tape. Either the tape is blank, contains non-BRU archives, or was created with a different buffer size than 128k. If this is a known BRU tape, double check the buffer size setting in preferences and retry the import."

So my closest guess (since I know the tape is not blank) BRU will just read BRU files, correct?

Is there any other software that I could try to use to read this data?

I need to make sure it works before buying it.

LL
 
I haven't found anything. I also haven't been looking since my last post.

I assume without proof that BRU uses a proprietary format. Ditto Retrospect. Did you try that?
 
Not yet. But I guessing my main problem is the connection (scsi/firewire converter). Tomorrow I'll be able to test with a G5.

Tks
 
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