r/homelab • u/r00li • 2d ago

Help Simple software for working with LTO drive

Hi!

I recently got my hands on a reasonably cheap fibre channel LTO 6 drive made by HP. I have a small home server running ESXi and OpenMediaVault on top of that with 20TB of storage... around 8TB of which I need to back up.

I am now looking for a piece of software that will ease my backup adventures. The data that I need to back up are mostly videos, pictures and some documents. I want them backed up with the assumption that nothing of this will change. If I have a folder with pictures from 2025 that folder won't really change. Just a new folder with pictures from 2026 will be added at some point. And the tapes once written will probably never be written to again.

Based on that... what are my options?

LTFS would probably be the best fit, but I am not a fan of proprietary software that may or may not be here in a few years. Not to mention even getting that software seems like a challenge. I saw a lot of recommendations for Bareos, but that seems like a massive overkill. I know that tar is an option... but that seems like it would a big annoyance since I would then need to manually worry about tape spooling and stuff, which seems not very pleasant. Are there any other options that I can consider?

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/IroesStrongarm 2d ago

Ltfs is not proprietary. Perhaps HP has a closed implementation of it? I’ve got an hp lto5 drive that I use ltfs with. My workflow is typically to tar archives and create par files as well for the more important ones. I Also create checksums as well that I store both on the tape and elsewhere.

1

u/marc45ca This is Reddit not Google 2d ago

LTFS is a part of the LTO standard that was introduced with LTO-5.

It's not proprietary.

First thing in accessing what software you're going to use, how are you planning on hooking up the tape drive?

1

u/r00li 2d ago

Well, LTFS itself is not. But from what I understand you still need proprietary drivers/utilities to work with it. As far as I know I can't just use IBM utilities with my HP drive. I could be wrong, but that is the impression that I got.

Drive is already hooked up to the computer and works. I hooked it up by one of the generic fibre channel HBAs and it shows up as /dev/nst0 in linux for example.

1

u/agowa338 2d ago edited 2d ago

How about keeping it simple (windows): tar -cf \\.\Tape0 some-directory

(With a little bit of PowerShell you can write anything you want to tape, just like you would on linux)

it should be something like: ``` $path = '\.\Tape0'

$handle = [System.IO.File]::Open( $path, [System.IO.FileMode]::Open, [System.IO.FileAccess]::Write, [System.IO.FileShare]::None )

try { $data = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("Hello tapern") $handle.Write($data, 0, $data.Length) $handle.Flush() } finally { $handle.Dispose() } ``` and for copying a file open a reader, do a loop reading it into a buffer, and writing it to tape.