I'm currently experiencing one of those nice foobar situations where the primary backup of a certain project died and the secondary backup was written on and LTFS formatted LTO-6 - apparently by someone who had no concept of what the L(inear) in LTO meant.
The data on the tape is a number of 200-500GB sized archives. They are meant to be written onto the tape one after the other. In this case however it appears they were written using probably Windows Explorer, with multiple files in parallel.
This resulted in heavy fragmentation of the archives, cause the drive to read a few GB, then spool away, then read another few MB, then hop around again. This will go on for 12 or more hours. Then eventually something just gives up (drive, drive, not sure, but the copy process fails).
The question now is, is there any way to salvage the data. This is a Tandberg LTO-6HH running on Windows, if that makes any difference.
Some ideas to which I have found no solution:
Is there any tool out there (Windows) that will somehow improve handling of fragmented data by just reading from the beginning of the tape to the end, dumping the data into multiple file streams on its way?
Alternatively, is there a command to dump the entire LTFS contents into some folder in a single go, again without jumping around? Maybe something like a virtual ltfs drive that the tape could be cloned to?