Using LTO tape under Win 7 Pro?

dan_aka_jack · 27 Sep 2009 at 11:32

Hi there,

I have upgraded from Win XP to Win 7 Pro and so far I'm enjoying Win 7. However, one major gripe so far is that I can't access my LTO2 tapes from Win 7 because the Win 7 backup utility doesn't seem to talk to my LTO2 drive (I have installed the drivers for the LTO drive and SCSI card).

I have had a conversation about this over on technet.microsoft.com but they haven't been able to help me out.

I simply can't believe that Microsoft would have "forgotten" to enable LTO access in Win 7 Pro. That's rediculous. I can't be the only person in the world who backed up to LTO2 from Win XP and has now upgraded to Win 7. Is my only option to dual-boot Win 7 and XP? I have too many LTO2 tapes to consider converting all my backups to an alternative medium.

Many thanks,
Jack

paradigm · 27 Sep 2009 at 11:50

Windows Backup no longer uses tape drives of any kind IIRC.

You'll have to use 3rd party backup software, however even that might prove tricky as even the big players such as Backup Exec don't work on Server 2008 R2 yet (same platform as 7). I'm currently waiting for BE 2010 at work.

dan_aka_jack · 27 Sep 2009 at 13:14

Thanks for the info.

I think I'm leaning towards a 3rd option: I have a Linux box which I use for web development which is attached to my main PC via gigabit Ethernet. Perhaps I should stick my LTO2 drive into my Linux box and backup over the network.

Does anyone know if Linux will be able to make sense of my LTO2 tapes which were created on WinXP?

accod · 28 Sep 2009 at 16:10

Linux won't be able to recover files from the tapes if that's what you're asking. You might be able to cat the contents of the tape to file, give the file a .bkf extension, and then load it up in an old version of ntbackup. I doubt that will work though as that would be too sensible for MS.

MasterPlan1 · 29 Sep 2009 at 02:02

http://gnawgnu.blogspot.com/2009/08/windows-2008-r2-backup-exec-and-failure.html - ok, so it's not using ntbackup, but if you're a user that can afford a LTO2 drive, and media, I'm sure you could probably swing for a BE12.5 licence... or "aquire" one by some way, shape, or form.

accod · 29 Sep 2009 at 09:34

Just found this that might do what you want... "Utility for restoring backups made on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to computers running Windows Vista and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008.". It doesn't mention tape drives though.

dan_aka_jack · 29 Sep 2009 at 20:17

Many thanks for all the replies.

Unfortunately the "Windows Backup - Restore Utility" doesn't work on Windows 7 because Win7 doesn't have the "Removable Storage Management" feature.

And unfortunately I'm pretty skint! I got my LTO2 drive for £250 from that yellow auction site and I get my LTO2 media for about £8 a tape from that auction site too.

Thanks for all the replies. Sounds like my only option is to keep an XP machine alive someone on my home-office network. What an absolute PITA. I opted for archive onto LTO2 largely because I thought it would outlive the alternatives (e.g. archiving onto USB hard disks). I'm really astonished that Microsoft would kill support for LTO. Very, very unimpressed.

Bad Microsoft!

MasterPlan1 · 29 Sep 2009 at 20:32

I'm not sure if this'll work, but...

VMWare Server installed on your machine, have a WinXP machine VM on there enable pass through of the LTO2 drive, and use that? Set up network internally VM Host > VM (so it doesn't touch your network) ?

Just a thought.

dan_aka_jack · 30 Sep 2009 at 12:24

Sounds interesting. Will the instance of XP running on VMWare Server be able to access SCSI card on my PCI bus? Win7's "XP Mode" (i.e. running XP in Microsoft's VM) can't talk to the PCI bus.

iaind · 30 Sep 2009 at 14:32

I've done it before - it works fine, Server supports SCSI passthrough

Good suggestion!

dan_aka_jack · 30 Sep 2009 at 15:16

Cool, thanks for the advice.

To be honest, I think I will just stick with having an old PC running XP running which can pull data over the GigE network. My main PC is used for video editing so I'm keen to keep is as clean as possible in terms of the number of installed apps. Thanks loads for the info though.

MasterPlan1 · 30 Sep 2009 at 17:16

dan_aka_jack said:
Sounds interesting. Will the instance of XP running on VMWare Server be able to access SCSI card on my PCI bus? Win7's "XP Mode" (i.e. running XP in Microsoft's VM) can't talk to the PCI bus.

I'm not sure that'll work via the MS Route, but VMWare Server is pretty small, set up a XP machine with a 2Gb disk, 512mb of RAM, the entire shebang should take up <3Gb of disk space. Even though you want to keep your box clean for VE, this'll be the most cost effective method of doing it.

dan_aka_jack · 2 Oct 2009 at 11:07

ok cool, thanks for the info - I'll give it a go on a quiet day