LTFS has been reasonably well supported and it’s fairly open. (I think it’s totally open and published, but I haven’t drilled deep in to it) I haven’t manually

LTFS has been reasonably well supported and it’s fairly open. (I think it’s totally open and published, but I haven’t drilled deep in to it) I haven’t manually restored files but I have switched vendors and it was transparent. It makes tape almost shockingly good, if you can identify by name what you want to recover you can recover it quite quickly. I had previously used Blu-ray for backups, I think they are fairly durable if you have a dry, cool place to store them, but if you have to find date spread over 20 discs, it’s quite a pain. Now it would feel better if Redhat or Suse or somebody cooked ltfs in to their products as a first class thing. I think the catastrophic recovery process would involve building enough of a system to download and install ltfs to access the tapes. I could also create a “recovery system” and then just tar that on to a tape too. My advice strategy has been to keep things relatively warm and when ltfs starts to feel like a liability then I’m going to move the whole archive to something else, fortunately it’s not 100s of br discs, it’s tens of tapes so it will take some hours but it’s mostly waiting on data to stream.