Mark Schoonover wrote: > Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2 > tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. AIT is a helical scan format based on 8mm video tape, and is quite slow, LTO is a 'serpentine' linear format. i've had to do very few restores from our LTO-2 system in my lab at work. Let me see how this works, I'll do a trial restore to a scratch folder of a few dozen gigabytes. fyi, its on a windows 2003 server, and I'm using the HP Data Protector Express software that came with the tape drive (a little klunky in the GUI, but very functional for me so far), so this won't be directly comparable to whatever Linux backup software someone might be using, but its indicative of the hardware performance, at least. I'm writing the restore to a 4 x 73GB SCSI raid3 (HP SmartArray something-or-the-other thats built into a DL380G4) ok, its restored 20GB so far in 30 minutes, so 40GB/hour for LTO-2 looks good. thats about 18700 files in 8700 folders, btw. Yes, a full 400GB tape might take 10 hours at this rate. thats quite a lot of files. LTO3 is nearly twice as fast, but then you could start getting into disk file system performance limitations