Using empty space on tapes?

[LIGHTNINGAD]

I'm running Retrospect 13 on a mac, and i have just spotted that one of the backup scripts has been set incorrectly to "skip to new media" in the schedule pane.  So i now have a load of tapes with just a few gb's being used and terabytes of unused wasted space.

 

Is there a way to get Retrospect to use these tapes to their full capacity without losing the data thats already on them?

 

thanks

Adam 

[twickland]

Once Retrospect has gone on to a new member, there is no way to add data to a previous member. The only way to reuse the tapes without losing the data would be to copy the existing data to a new or different media set.

 

If you are going to copy directly from one tape media set to another, you need to have two tape drives. Of you have only one drive, you would need to copy to a disk (or other non-tape) media set, and then copy from that set to the tape set.

 

You didn't say how many full tape members you have in this media set. To save time, you could get by with only consolidating the data from the short members, if you know when you began to write to the first short member, and copy only the data from that time forward to a new disk media set. You would then mark all of the short members as "missing" and copy the data from the disk media set to an erased tape, which would become the next member of your tape media set.