Are there signs that a cartridge tape backup is about to fail?

There are different types of cartridges of backup available on the market today, and depending on the technology in use, indications that a band is going to fail can be difficult to spot. With the old cartridges backup, such as 8 mm, QIC, DLT - S, DLT - V and various formats of digital audio tape (DAT), administrators spend much time looking for error messages in the log files. But, despite the efforts of administrators, there are many cases reported data backups completed without errors reported where the backup tape is later found to be unreadable.

Modern tape technology leads the industry in the detection of errors and correction.De many schemes different-correction of errors, such as the use of parity, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes, checksum, codes of Reed-Solomon encoding of Reed-Solomon Cross-interleaved (IARC) and much more, can recover data from damaged media.

More recently, LTO (Linear Tape-open) cartridges has made several improvements to backup cartridges by improving the band leader and adding a memory chip each chip cartouche.La CM (LTO - CM) cartridge stores a variety of metadata to use the cartridge life. Information, such as the remaining capacity, total number of reads, writes, loads, error codes, and even information about used tape drives to read or write this cartridge in its life, are stored on the CM chip.

Each LTO drive has a CM drive in order to assess the information stored on the chip CM.Media smart data such as FujiFilm Corporation, Imation Corp., Maxell and multiple third-party manufacturers have products available to analyze the CM.Some CM as StorSentry Hi-Stor monitoring tools work in e.d. band ' others as crossroads systems hardware ReadVerify (RVA), work out-of - band .Certains CM monitoring development tools on the management of cartridges themselves, while others provide a service that integrates the management of the environment, including the library, drive repair services, configuration and optimization of the performances.Tous main library vendors provide a form any service management/monitoring and/or software as well.

Cartridges do turn red, send e-mails or flashes of sitting on the shelf, but adding metadata and cartridges monitoring tools can help detect tape challenges and reduce instances of data loss.

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