Backward compatibility of tapes using NTBackup

[Merlin]

I'd like to use an external USB AIT tape drive (Sony AITe130-UL = SDX-D520C)
with NTBackup. It works fine for new backups but any older tapes I have from
either my previous Sony AIT-1 drive or my current HP AIT-2 drive (both SCSI
internal) appears in RSM under the Unrecognized pool, and there's no way I
can restore from them.

To narrow down whether this was isolated to one PC I have built another PC
with XP Pro SP3 and installed both the internal HP AIT-2 drive and the
external USB drive.

Using tapes originally created on the old PC (also XP Pro), all of which
were initially unknown to NTBackup on the new PC, the results are:

* The internal HP drive recognises all tapes: AIT-1 written by an older Sony
AIT-1 drive, AIT-2 written by the same drive, and AIT-2 written by the Sony
USB drive. The only (pleasant) surprise there is that the Sony USB drive
claims a higher level of compression (130GB vs 100GB) so I thought there was
a risk that the HP-branded drive might not handle the Sony's compression.

* The external Sony drive recognises AIT-2 tapes written by itself but does
not recognise ANY other tapes. Not even AIT-1 from another Sony drive.

I've emailed Sony thru their support page but needless to say have not had a
response.

Does anyone have any experience of getting one of these external USB drives
to read ANYTHING that hasn't been written on the same sort of drive?

 

[sgopus]

a big reason most users went away from tapes and ntbackup.
I seem to remember it was an issue with NTBackup not the drive, but can't
remember the specifics. I stopped using ntbackup and use Acronis True Image,
much better backup software.

 

[Merlin]

I believe in having multiple generations of backup for weekly, monthly,
quarterly, 6-monthly, which is something that proponents of disk backup
typically don't achieve because of the media cost. I'll probably abandon tape
when flash memory gets a little less expensive but not before.

As for NTBackup - I've used NTBackup with tape for many years without any
actual problems, and the purpose of the post was to try to ascertain whether
this is a known problem with NTBackup, a known problem with external tape
drives, or some weird one-off issue.

I could potentially restore all the old tapes one by one and then back the
data up again with the external drive, in which case I could use something
like Acronis as an alternative to NTBackup, but that would be stupidly time
consuming and shouldn't be necessary.

 

[Merlin]

I decided to follow your lead and give ATI (Acronis True Image, Echo
Workstation flavour) a try. Nice software, I'd happily buy it if it would
solve this issue somehow.

I tried backing up to the internal tape drive, then attempted a restore from
both the internal and external tape drives. The internal was fine, but the
external failed - the Acronis softare couldn't find its archive and
effectively told me to insert another tape.

This suggests that the problem is not confined to NTBackup and is therefore
either a problem with Removable Storage Manager, which (according to their
website) Acronis uses for dealing with tapes; or with the external tape drive
or its driver.

Incidentally RSM also shows the Acronis tapes as Unreconized (even on the
original drive that wrote them) and assigns them a new numerical 'name' each
time they're inserted in the drive. But I would imagine that's normal for
anything that hasn't been written by a Windows component.