docs: tape: add lto 9 considerations

LTO-9 requires a bit of special handling while formatting/first use, so
document that, so nobody is suprised by this behaviour.

Signed-off-by: Dominik Csapak <d.csapak@proxmox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Dominik Csapak 2023-12-12 15:34:25 +01:00 committed by Dietmar Maurer
parent 3cca5d7fc4
commit f622695532

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@ -98,6 +98,31 @@ so it takes 33 hours to read the 12TB needed to fill up an LTO-8 tape. If you wa
to write to your tape at full speed, please make sure that the source
datastore is able to deliver that performance (for example, by using SSDs).
LTO-9+ considerations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Since LTO-9, it is necessary to initialize new media in your drives, this is
called `Media Optimization`. This usually takes between 40 and 120 minutes per
medium. It is recommended to initialize your media in this manner with the
tools provided by your hardware vendor of your drive or changer. Some tape
changers have a method to 'bulk' initialize your media.
Because of this, formatting tapes is handled differently in Proxmox Backup
Server to avoid re-optimizing on each format/labelling. If you want to format
your media for use with the Proxmox Backup Server the first time or after use
with another program, either use the functionality of your drive/changer, or
use the 'slow' format on the cli:
.. code-block:: console
# proxmox-tape format --drive your-drive --fast 0
This will completely remove all pre-existing data and trigger a `Media
Optimization` pass.
If you format a partitioned LTO-9 medium with the 'fast' method (the default or
by setting `--fast 1`), only the first partition will be formatted, so make
sure to use the 'slow' method.
Terminology
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