Copying v4, v5, v6 tapes to a modern version of the app?

[oslomike]

I've been recatalogging whatever I can with the 10.5 version of Retrospect but this process got me thinking. Since the recatalogging requires that all the tapes be read, would it be possible to skip the process of recatalogging and simply restore everything on the tapes to a Retrospect File on a hard disk? Is there a way to make getting the data off the old systems without having to keep a dinosaur machine up and running that is soon 20 years old?

All tips and suggestions are appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance. 🙂

[boomcha]

I no longer have to maintain a huge archive of old work backed up with those versions for someone else but still use Retrospect for my one man retouching show, but I think that you are proposing makes sense. This way you would be able to pick and choose what gets restored and actually verify that it's working and still there.

The only thing that you would lose would be all the different versions of files if you needed them because of the incremental backup.

[oslomike]

Thanks boomcha, I’m also very interested in what steps I would need to take to make it a reality. How do you do it?

[Lennart_T]

I think you need to do a recatalog first and then you can do a "Copy Media Set" to a Disk media set.

If you created those tapes with the "Fast catalog rebuild" option turned on, you only need the last tape for the recatalog operation.

[oslomike]

Hi Lennart!

Thanks for the info. Did v4 - v6 have a fast rebuild option? 

[Lennart_T]

24 minutes ago, oslomike said:

Did v4 - v6 have a fast rebuild option? 

I do not remember. Probably not, I'm afraid.

[DavidHertzberg]

oslomike,

No, Retrospect Mac 6 and before did not have a fast catalog rebuild option.

I first did a browser scan of previous versions of the Retrospect Mac User's Guide, located here.  That took all of 5 minutes, and showed the feature was introduced with Retrospect Mac 8. 

I then did a Forums search for "fast catalog rebuild" (with the quotation marks), and sorted the results by date.  I then looked at the earliest results, and found this one—in which natew confirmed that Retrospect Mac 6 did not have a fast catalog rebuild option.  The post following his quoted from a Knowledge Base article, but the  poster jdk never provided a link to the article.  So I did a browser search of the Knowledge Base, and found "Catalog Rebuild – Retrospect 6 for Mac" giving a non-fast-rebuild procedure.

Regarding your OP, here's a 2018 post by the head of Retrospect Tech Support saying tapes don't have .rdb files—which actually contain the backed-up data on Media Set's disk Members.  Therefore it would be impossible to "simply restore everything on the tapes to a Retrospect File on a hard disk", unless you can get R.T.S. to supply a—probably non-existent—program that creates from tapes a disk Member folder of .rdb and .session files.

Since your other recent thread says you have a Mac Pro (5,1) "backup server", why don't you attach the tape drive from your  "dinosaur machine ... that is soon 20 years old" to that 10-year-old machine?  Since the Mac Pro (5,1) has 4 PCI card slots, you could probably move over the SCSI card from that "dinosaur" if it is needed to run the old tape drive.  If it's not an ATTO card—needed to run SCSI on macOS later than 10.3, you can buy one for US$40 on eBay.

 

[oslomike]

Hi David!

Thanks for all that detail. Here's a solution that I've managed to come up with that gets me a lot closer to what I wanted, but maybe you can advise me about a better way. Here's how to go from v5 to today's version.

1. I put the ATTO scsi card in the old Mac that still runs Retrospect 6.1

2. This allows me to do a copy from my tape storage sets (in my case it's from an old Exabyte tape drive) to file media sets on a local disk. This seems to work for both v5 storage sets and v6 storage sets. It looks very promising that my older v4 DAT tapes will work as well since the v4 catalogs open on Retrospect v6.1.

3. After doing the copy to a file set, the result is two files with exactly the same name, but one of the files has a .cat suffix where the other has no suffix. AND, now these new File media sets are all v6.1 media sets.

4. I then copy these newly created media set files to my other Mac running Retrospect 10.5 where I then do another copy, which goes a hell of a lot faster now that the data is on disk instead of tape, and the end result is a modern retrospect media set that can be read by v17. 

5. Problem is: once the catalogs are copied again with v10.5, the backup snapshots seem to be gone. I can search for files and folders but that seems to be the only way to get data off. My work around is to do a search with 6 rules, where each rule is a single vowel letter, and then the results are 99.9% of the entire disk. The only folders that wouldn't show up would be those with only numbers or punctuation, something I never do at the root level.

 

So, is there any way to get the snapshots to follow all the way through this process? Any suggestions to make this a more streamlined processes much appreciated. 

 

Thanks!

[DavidHertzberg]

oslomike,

The "more streamlined process" would be to do what I outlined in the last paragraph of this up-thread post.  The basic idea is to put the ATTO SCSI card into your new Mac, attach your old tape drive to it, and then do a Restore from those tapes to a newly-created Disk—not File—Media Set using Retrospect 10.5.  This may create new snapshots. BTW I'm assuming the Retrospect engineers have not deleted the interface code for your old Exabyte tape drive, but you can check for that model in the Devices widget—specifying "Exabyte" and "SCSI" and "All (49 media types)".

Forget about using File Media Sets; they are "bereft of life" for all new uses.  This 2016 post mentions a .cat file; IIRC it's created when the Catalog for a File Media Set is too big to fit within the rigidly-size-limited (pages 35–36 of the Retrospect Mac 10.5 User's Guide) File Media Set itself.

Per the first paragraph in  this post in another recent thread, , I recommend you try to upgrade to Retrospect Mac 11 before doing the Restore.

 

[oslomike]

HI David,

I see your point and I actually tried that first, but there were several problems. 1. The macOS/Retrospect engine combination didn't like the old ATTO drivers and were only sometimes talking to the tape drives. 2. I had already installed v17 to keep my daily scripts running on the SAS tape drive, which made it undesirable to downgrade to 10.5, which I needed to open older v6 catalogs. and 3, I still needed to run v6.1 on the old Mac to open even older catalogs, v4 and v5. So, once I'm at the point where I have at least all the old v4 and v5 catalogs recatalogged as v6, I'll have to keep the old Mac doing it's thing. The original motive for doing a media set copy to a File format is to get those catalogs off the old media that is getting old. For some reason, I wasn't up to date on the possibility of a Disk Media set. I'll have to look into that! Thanks! I only very recently migrated. 🙂

[Nigel Smith]

10 hours ago, oslomike said:

My work around is to do a search with 6 rules, where each rule is a single vowel letter, and then the results are 99.9% of the entire disk. The only folders that wouldn't show up would be those with only numbers or punctuation, something I never do at the root level.

Do a search with both the "Include" and "Exclude" boxes empty -- that should return every file that was ever backed up.

10 hours ago, oslomike said:

So, is there any way to get the snapshots to follow all the way through this process? Any suggestions to make this a more streamlined processes much appreciated. 

You should be able to re-catalog the tapes in 10.5, then directly "Copy Media Set" from tape to a new disk media set, retaining all snapshot information etc.

[oslomike]

Thanks Nigel! Great tip about the search Include/Exclude! I'll try that!

Re: recatalogging old tapes, I can't seem to get 10.5 to read v4 or v5 tapes, they show up on the console as "wrong version" or "unknown", I can't remember which it is.

Is this possible: Will retrspect 10.5 recatalog a file set made in v6.1 (file set seems to be a set of two, same name for both but one has a .cat suffix) and be able to read the snapshots?

 

thanks!

[oslomike]

Nigel, How do I get the "include" and 'exclude" boxes. Which parameters need to be set for those to show up?

Also, recatalogging backup v6 backup sets in v10.5 doesn't bring along the snapshots. Am I doing something wrong?

[DavidHertzberg]

oslomike,

With regard to the problem you described in this up-thread post, I suggest the following: Move the ATTO SCSI card back to your machine running Retrospect 6, then restore those tapes written by Retrospect 4 and Retrospect 5 to a Subvolume assigned to a temporary folder created on that machine.  Next, backup that Subvolume to one or more tapes, which should be readable by Retrospect Mac 10.5.  Finally, delete the temporary folder created on the Retrospect 6 machine.

[Nigel Smith]

On 12/29/2020 at 11:41 AM, oslomike said:

Re: recatalogging old tapes, I can't seem to get 10.5 to read v4 or v5 tapes, they show up on the console as "wrong version" or "unknown", I can't remember which it is.

IIRC, you have have to go from vWhatever -> v6 -> v10.

On 12/29/2020 at 6:32 PM, oslomike said:

Nigel, How do I get the "include" and 'exclude" boxes. Which parameters need to be set for those to show up?

In v10, try using Backup Assistant and selecting "Search for files in selected media sets" in step 1. Then, in the "Search Files and Folders" dialog, use "Any" and "File Name contains" but leave the text box empty (see pp 142-145 of the v10 User Guide).

On 12/29/2020 at 6:32 PM, oslomike said:

Also, recatalogging backup v6 backup sets in v10.5 doesn't bring along the snapshots. Am I doing something wrong?

Do check carefully -- run Restore Assistant on the rebuilt set and see if the "More Backups..." button gives access to the "missing" snapshots.

But I honestly don't know. My experience is with v6 Internet Backup sets, which can't be converted, so I've been doing full v6 restores (including every versioned file) of every client and then backing up those restore folders with the newer RS version.

I'd hope it would work, but if your experience says otherwise you should trust it! But do you need to do point-in-time restores from those old sets? I have no need of recreating an hard drive from 10 years ago but I do need to be able to eg pull back original experimental data if it is ever questioned -- your actual needs may also make snapshot retrieval unnecessary.

[oslomike]

Hello David and Nigel,

Thanks so much for the tips on how to do this. What I've found to work best so far is to copy/transfer the tapes to a File Backup Set for anything on tape from v4-v6. I've been advised not to use File Sets, but Retro v6 can't make a Disk set as far as I can tell. Is this correct? The advantages of the v6 File Set is, is that it's literally all the data off the old tapes and all the snapshots  follow along, PLUS the data is instantly retrievable without having to use the old tapes and drive. As you both have noted, getting info off the v4-v6 tapes using Retrospect v6.1 is the first step. So far so good. Now comes the part that I'm really trying to figure out; how to rebuild the files sets from v6.1 with v10.5, AND have the snapshots also follow. The clue here seems to be that a Retro v6.1 File set is actually two files, one is  the .cat file and the other is the data. Retrospect v6.1 knows this and in the restore window, the backup set looks like a folder as opposed to a single catalog file. When trying to copy the File Set from v6.1 using v10.5, thus ending up with a 10.5 File Set,  Retrospect doesn't even recognise the .cat file, it only recognises the other data file. It will happily copy the File Set and it's now readable by v10.5, BUT the snapshots seem to be discarded. SO, do you know if Retro v10.5 does anything different regarding cataloging vs. copying a v6.1 File Set? It seems that whether I choose Rebuild Media Set or Copy Media Set, Retro 10.5 discards the catalog info. I need to look into this more, but if anyone knows the answers, I'm all ears. 🙂 Thanks again!

[Nigel Smith]

18 hours ago, oslomike said:

but Retro v6 can't make a Disk set as far as I can tell. Is this correct?

They were called "Removable Disk Backup Sets" back then. Their main advantages over "File Backup Sets" is that they can span media and can be larger than the maximum file size permitted by your OS. 

"Removable" sets store their catalog separately, "File" sets store the catalog in the file's resource fork until that exceeds the OS's resource fork size limit (16MB) at which time it is split out into a separate file, which is what you are seeing.

Check your v6 "File" set. Does that have snapshots? It may be that you are losing them in the v6 tape->file part of the process, and not during the v10 rebuild.

[oslomike]

Hi Nigel,

v6.1 File Sets that were rebuilt with tapes from v4,v5 and v6 all have the catalogs (including snapshots) readable by Retrospect v6.1. And, some of the file sets in this case are over 100Gigs so file/catalog size doesn't seem to matter. The problem seems to be that Retro v10.5 doesn't import the catalog (including snapshots) when I rebuild a retrospect v6.1 file set.

Interestingly though, snapshots do get saved when I do a recatalog from the tapes themselves that are readable (v4 and v5 catalogs can't be read by v10.5).

I suspect that Retrospect v10.5 was put together to rebuild catalogs only if they were rebuilt from tapes, not File Sets.

[DavidHertzberg]

oslomike,

I'm sorry I didn't post this earlier, but sleep overcame me.  Meanwhile Nigel Smith, in his ex-EU location (Happy Brexit, Nigel 😄  ),  has posted—but he didn't think of the following possible solution still being used as of 2019 by billbobdole of the Engineering School at Texas A & M University.

First my analysis, with which I think no one will disagree:   As you report directly above, Retrospect Mac 10.5 does not read any associated .cat file when it rebuilds a v6.1 File Backup Set into a v10.5 File Media Set.  Therefore the solution might be to break up each of your created-from-Tape v6 File Backup Sets into multiple ones that don't have .cat files—because the snapshots are in the resource fork.  Then maybe v10.5 would keep the snapshots when you do a Rebuild.  As Nigel has posted, Removable Disk Backup Sets were generalized in v8 into Disk Media Sets—preferable to File Media Sets.  (FYI Retrospect Windows still also has Removable Disk Backup Sets, but these should only be used by old-timers clinging to their no-longer-manufactured "superfloppies"; Retrospect Windows administrators often get into trouble defining  RDX cartridges as Removable Disks.)

How could you accomplish the breaking-up?  billbobdole was as of June 2020 still using a trick for File Media Sets, described by twickland in this 2010 post.  If you do a New Media backup to a File Backup Set, Retrospect will "Create a new destination file and associated catalog with a subnumber appended to the backup set's name (i.e., [001], [002], etc.)."  If you first did a  New Media backup using a No Files Selector—page 179 of the Retrospect Mac 6 User's Guide—to create such a File Backup Set with a sub-number appended to its name, and then did a Transfer—pages 60–61—to that same sub-numbered File Backup Set using a custom Selector—pages 180–186—limiting the Transfer to a specific date range, that would create a sub-numbered File Backup Set that could be small enough to have its catalog in the resource fork and need no associated .cat file.

Ideally,  given what you posted above while I was writing this post, a simpler solution would be to use a v6 Transfer to populate a previously-defined v6 Tape Backup Set with the contents of each v4 or v5 Tape Backup Set.  These should be readable by v10.5.  However I realized after first posting this that you probably don't have the SCSI interface and drive hardware to attach two different tape drives at the same time to your Mac booting v6.  So here's a realistic simple solution: Create a single v6 File Backup Set as large as possible.  Then—one Backup Set at a time—Transfer without Selectors each v4 or v5 Tape Backup Set to the single File Backup Set, create a new v6 Tape Backup Set with a name similar to the Transferred v4 or v5 Tape Backup Set,  Transfer without Selectors the File Backup Set to the newly-created v6 Tape Backup Set, and finally Recycle the single File Backup Set to clear it for the next Transfer.  This saves disk space on your old Mac—also on your new Mac if Tape's OK, but uses more blank tapes.

In regards to your thanks below, some of us enjoy solving somewhat-difficult problems for other administrators.😀

 

 

 

Edited January 8, 2021 by DavidHertzberg
Realized that you probably don't have the SCSI interface and drive hardware to attach two different tape drives at the same time to your Mac booting v6, so expand and then simplify 4th paragraph. Add preferability of Disk Media Sets to 2nd paragraph.

[oslomike]

David, thanks for all the effort in helping out, I appreciate it!  All of the input was very useful. I think the way forward for me is to keep using the old Mac that's running 6.1 and rebuild all my old v4-v6 Tape backup sets to be File Sets in a v6.1 format. What I'll be left with are File Sets that have catalogs and snapshots and are restorable very quickly. Since the goal here was to get rid of the old machine setup. I will probably rebuild the v6.1 file sets within v10.5 so that they are at least searchable and fairly easily retrievable; I'll leave the old machine turned off until needed. Lastly, I'll backup the v6.1 File Sets as well as the rebuilt 10.5 File Sets to the new v17 LTO system. Some of it seems redundant but that way I know I have all my bases covered. Thanks to this community for being so helpful. Amazing! 🙂

[DavidHertzberg]

On 1/1/2021 at 10:17 AM, oslomike said:

Hi Nigel,

v6.1 File Sets that were rebuilt with tapes from v4,v5 and v6 all have the catalogs (including snapshots) readable by Retrospect v6.1. And, some of the file sets in this case are over 100Gigs so file/catalog size doesn't seem to matter. The problem seems to be that Retro v10.5 doesn't import the catalog (including snapshots) when I rebuild a retrospect v6.1 file set.

Interestingly though, snapshots do get saved when I do a recatalog from the tapes themselves that are readable (v4 and v5 catalogs can't be read by v10.5).

I suspect that Retrospect v10.5 was put together to rebuild catalogs only if they were rebuilt from tapes, not File Sets.

oslomike,

In view of your first and third paragraphs (after "Hi Nigel") in your post I've quoted here, I don't see why—in your post immediately above this post—"rebuild the v6.1 file sets within v10.5 so that they are at least searchable and fairly easily retrievable" is going to do much for you.  All it's going to do is require you to "leave the old machine turned off until needed"—meaning until needed into the far future.  How do you know your v6 machine will last into the far future?  My 2001 G4 Digital Audio Mac—given to me by my ex-wife—stopped being able to boot about 2 months ago.

That's why I suggested, in the final long paragraph of this above post,  creating v6 Tape Backup Sets that are readable in v10.5.  The last paragraph in your post I've quoted says "I suspect that Retrospect v10.5 was put together to rebuild catalogs only if they were rebuilt from tapes, not File Sets."  However I now see that I've ignored the tape hardware generation problem in creating tapes that are writeable in v6 and readable in v10.5.  Can you install a SCSI—and I don't mean SAS—interface card in your 10.5 machine to which you can attach the tape drive from your v6 machine?

But I've now thought of a further alternative.  Instead of trying to Rebuild your v6 File Sets in v10.5, do Copy Media Set operations to convert them to equivalent v10.5 Disk Media Sets.  And I don't mean File Media Sets; face up to the fact  that File Media Set Catalogs are not fully supported in v10.5 🙁,  because in 2012 Retrospect Inc. already considered them to be obsolete relics of the ancient days of small and expensive HDDs.  CopyMedia Set scripts are summarized on page 153 and discussed on pages 154–155 of the Retrospect Mac 10 User's Guide.  Because "Copy Media Set makes a copy of the backed up data [my emphasis] contained in a source Media Set to a specified destination Media Set", the Catalog File it creates for the destination Disk Media Set should be complete including snapshots.

P.S.: If you instead want to get Retrospect enhanced to once again—if it ever did—correctly Rebuild the Catalog File for a File Media Set, here's why and how to request that enhancement.  However, in assessing your chances of getting that done for Retrospect 18, consider this: The other day I had to submit a Support Case to get the posts of three obvious spammers removed from the Retrospect Forums.  I had already done a "Report post" for each of those spam posts, and in prior years that would have been sufficient to get the removal done, but it seems the head of Tech Support is too busy now to look at posts that administrators have merely reported.  Why is he so busy?  IMHO both long paragraphs of this post in another thread give the answer to that question—an answer that also applies to the Retrospect "Inc." engineers.  Note that the delivery of the interlocking set of major enhancements described in the second long paragraph of that post has evidently now slipped from Retrospect 17.5 to Retrospect 18.x.

Edited January 9, 2021 by DavidHertzberg
P.S.: in assessing your chances of getting an enhancement to correctly Rebuild the Catalog File for a File Media Set done for Retrospect 18, consider this.

[oslomike]

Hello again David,

I'm coming to a similar conclusion as your proposal, which was to make v6.1 backup sets that can be read by 10.5. It's a monumental amount of time and babysitting needed to do it but I think if I just take my time, I'll eventually get there. One question though: If I can manage to connect a second LTO-5 tape drive to my 6.1 machine, could I save time by copying v6.1 File Sets-to-Media Sets? I have copied a large amount of older v5 tape sets to File sets using v6.1 and the File Sets all have their snapshots/catalogs in tact. The real question is, do you know if v6.1 will do a copy of a 6.1 File Set to my LTO-5 tape drive and have the snapshots and catalogs all be in tact? It will save me a lot of time. The LTO drive is so fast that reading a 10-tape sized File Set from disk, I can copy 10 AIT tapes in a matter of a couple hours instead of taking two days. Of course these new LTO media sets would have to be rebuilt in 10.5, but again the LTO transfer rate will save a ton of time. Thoughts?

[DavidHertzberg]

oslomike,

Yes, if I you can manage to connect a second LTO-5 tape drive to your 6.1 machine, you could (using v6.1 terminology) Transfer v6.1 File Backup Sets to v6.1 Tape Backup Sets. See pages 60–61 of the Retrospect Mac 6 User's Guide for a description of the "Transfer" operation.  Unlike Retrospect Mac 8 and onward, where the "Transfer" operation—with its different options—was revised into the Copy Media Set and Copy Backup script types, in v6.1 it is only executable as an Immediate operation.  "Setting Transfer Options" on page 61 says it will do what you want, because

Quote

The Copy Snapshots option transfers all of the source backup set’s Snapshots to the destination catalog and media. This option is on by default.

Don't turn on any of the other options listed under ""Backup Set Transfer Options" on page 145; they would do what you definitely don't want.  That's why v8 revised them into a Copy Backup script type—to be used for copying the last (or last few) backups—distinct from the Copy Media Set script type; see pages 153–158 of the Retrospect Mac 10 User's Guide.

When you say "copy 10 AIT tapes", I assume you mean the contents of 10 AIT tapes on a File Backup Set—unless your v6.1 machine can have both an AIT tape drive and an LTO tape drive connected at the same time.  Can your v10.5 machine either (a) have an LTO-5 tape drive connected or (b) have an LTO-6 or LTO-7 tape drive connected?  Either LTO-6 or LTO-7—but not later LTO generations—can read an LTO-5 tape.

You wouldn't have to Rebuild the Catalogs of those Tape Backup Sets in v10.5, just Add Tape Media Sets with the same names as the corresponding v6.1 Tape Backup Sets and the appropriate LTO tape(s) as one (or multiple) Member(s)—the Catalogs would be built by the Add process.  If you then wanted to copy one or more of these Tape Media Sets as Disk Media Sets (please not, for Heaven's sake, File Media Sets), you'd have to Add Disk Media Sets with similar names and then Run one-shot Copy Media Set scripts to copy the Snapshots and copy the backed-up data from tape to disk.

BTW, "intact" is a single word in English.  Since Norway didn't have the benefit 🤣 of a  Norman French occupation, you may not realize that "intact" is derived—through Middle French—from a single Latin word.  Don't feel embarassed; many native English speakers these days make the mistake of splitting the word into two words "in tact" when writing.

[oslomike]

Thanks for that David. I don’t understand how I wouldn’t have to rebuild catalogs in v10.5. Here’s the process I’m thinking. 
 

System for v6.1:

MacPro 2,1

ATTO SCSI PCI card connected to:

Exabyte tape drive SCSI

DAT tape drive SCSI

ATTO  SAS PCI card connected to:

LTO-5 Tape drive SAS

Process A:

1. Using v6.1, copy v4,v5,v6 Media Sets to v6.1 File Sets.

2. Using v6.1, copy those File sets to new v6.1 Media sets on the LTO-5 tape drive.

End result is new version of old backups on v6.1 LTO-5 Media set with snapshots in tact.

System for 10.5 and above:

Macpro 5,1

ATTO SAS PCI card

LTO-5 Tape drive SAS

Process B:

1. Rebuild new v6.1 Media sets (LTO-5 tape sets) using v10.5 so that now I have the v6.1 catalogs (with snapshots) readable by 10.5 and above. 
 

Thoughts?

 

[DavidHertzberg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Intelligent_Tape#AIT_generationsoslomike,

First, in your Process B.1 directly above,  the Retrospect Mac "backup server"—certainly for the Retrospect Mac 16.6 I use, won't allow Members for any type of Media Set unless each Member has a "label" derived from the name of that Media Set.  For a Disk Media Set, that means a Member file name consisting of the Media Set name preceded by a number and a dash (e.g. "1-Media Set Red" for a Member of "Media Set Red"). IIRC the same is true for a Tape Media Set, that means a Member tape label consisting of the Media Set name preceded by a number and a dash (I can't check this because my old Digital Audio G4, which I had been backing up to DAT tape with Retrospect Mac 6.1, stopped being able to boot 2 months ago).  AFAIK this Retrospect feature is designed to prevent mistakes in adding Members that shouldn't be part of a particular Media Set. 

That means your Process B.1 would effectively have to Add a Tape Media Set with the exact same Backup Set name as the one that created the LTO-5 tape(s) whose Catalog it is "rebuilding", with that/those LTO-5 tape(s) as its Member(s).  If your Mac Pro (5,1) already has a Media Set with that same name but different Members (e.g. a File Media Set), IMHO the easiest thing might be to Remove that existing Media Set and Finder-delete its Catalog File and its Members.  In any case the "rebuild" process would require your Mac Pro (5,1) to actually read the data on each LTO-5 tape, since Retrospect Mac 6.1 did not yet support the Fast Catalog Rebuild feature that writes at the front of each new tape a copy of the Catalog File as it existed before the first file is written to the new tape.

Second, I question whether your Process A needs to have step 1 and step 2 in most cases.  Given what I've written in the last sentence of the paragraph directly above this one in this post, wouldn't it be sufficient to simplify Process A to the following single step?

    1.Using v6.1, Copy v4,v5,v6 non-LTO-5 Tape Backup Sets to v6.1 LTO-5 Tape Backup Sets

The description of your Mac Pro (2,1) in the post directly above says your Exabyte—presumably AIT—and DAT tape drives are connected to a different SCSI PCI card on that machine than your LTO-5 drive, and your previous up-thread post implies reading AIT tapes is slower than writing LTO-5 tapes.  Of course, in those cases where you've already created v6.1 File Backup Sets, you can just execute your existing step A.2.