Retrospect with LTO 6

[retrospectnewbie16]

We have a new LTO 6 and I have connected the new storage device. You can see this within the Retrospect software 'Storage Devices'. However, when I kick of a LTO back up I can not see a way to select that device specifically. How do i know if the back up is being processed through the new device? At the moment the activity suggested it is backing up (with the running blue and white bars, it hasn't started properly yet.) The status has the spinning arrow wheel. Any advice or help would be appreciated. 

[twickland]

Are you really trying to use a new LTO-6 drive with Retrospect 6, which is probably a decade old? It would seem reasonable to expect that a piece of 10-year old software might not be capable of employing all of the necessary commands to communicate fully with a new tape drive. Please confirm which version of Retrospect you are running. (Perhaps you just posted this in the wrong forum.)

 

Retrospect doesn't back up to a device; it backs up to a Backup Set/Media Set (the first name being used in Retrospect 6 and earlier; the second is the current designation). Assuming that Retrospect can communicate with the tape drive and sees the correct tape in the drive (that is, the tape that is the most recent member of whatever you have specified as the destination tape media/backup set in your backup script), it will back up to that tape.

 

In recent versions of Retrospect, it is possible to specify which tape drive should be used for any given media set (this is referred to as binding the media set to the drive). I don't think there was any similar option with Retrospect 6. If a particular tape drive isn't specified, Retrospect will search all available drives for the appropriate media/backup set tape member that the script is calling for.