Sometimes, IT administration feels more like being a watchmaker. Today’s patient is a very old Tandberg StorageLoader tape library that has decided to act up again.
Because of its age, the mechanism is failing, and every so often, a tape gets completely jammed inside the drive. There is no software fix for this. The only solution is to physically take the device off the rack, unscrew the chassis, and manually—and very delicately—extract the stuck tape without damaging the fragile internal drive heads.
It is incredibly nerve-wracking work, and it’s a clear sign that this hardware has reached the end of its life. I’m currently pitching a brand-new LTO-8 or LTO-9 model to the client. Making the massive leap from our current LTO-5 generation would be an absolute game-changer, finally giving us the speed and capacity to run much larger, modern backups without the constant fear of hardware jams.
Fingers crossed the client approves the upgrade soon!
