LTFS Support for Windows and Mac

Directly writing to LTFS tape formatted media is supported in Retrospect 12 for Windows and Retrospect 14 for Mac or later.

The following scripts are supported:

• Copy/Duplicate scripts

You will need to format and mount the LTFS drive using the manufacturer’s included software. See below for details.

The following scripts are not supported:

• Backup scripts

• Archive scripts

These scripts are not supported due to their proprietary storage format. The purpose of LTFS is an application-agnostic file storage system. If you use Retrospect’s proprietary backup format, there is no need to use LTFS. You can use Retrospect’s tape set format as before.

For Retrospect for Mac to fully support LTFS, you will need to ensure the LTFS Manager is running as root.

For example, run the following in terminal:

sudo "./Applications/LTFS Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/LTFS Manager"

The name of the application varies between manufacturers.

Alternatively, you can use mkltfs to format the media and ltfs to mount the media, using Retrospect’s Script Hooks feature.

See Quantum's software.

NOTE:

If you try to use an LTFS formatted tape for backup (using a Backup Set), Retrospect will not be able to utilize the full capacity of the media. The LTFS utilities partition the tape and Retrospect is unable to reformat the tape back to the original size/capacity. More info on reformatting tapes can be found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAY-vMR7dHQ

Last Update: November 2023