I picked up an LTO-5 drive a couple years ago and one thing I found (this is probably a good place to bring it up!) is that the software documentation for tape

I picked up an LTO-5 drive a couple years ago and one thing I found (this is probably a good place to bring it up!) is that the software documentation for tape utilities and high-level overviews of the strategies employed to build and manage libraries of data on this model is pretty thin on the ground at this point. Completely understandable given how few people have tapes these days, but it also makes it a little tougher to pick up from scratch. (And in particular the high-level overviews are important because tapes are wear items, you only have on the order-of a hundred or two (don't remember the exact figures) full tape reads before the tape wears out, so this is something you want to go into it knowing a strategy and not making it up as you go!) Since it's complimentary to this discussion I'll link a few: https://www.cyberciti.biz/hardware/unix-linux-basic-tape-management-commands/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/hardware/unix-linux-basic-tape-man... https://databasetutorialpoint.wordpress.com/to-know-more/how-to-work-with-tape-driveslto-in-linux/ https://databasetutorialpoint.wordpress.com/to-know-more/how... https://sites.google.com/site/linuxscooter/linux/backups/tape-commands https://sites.google.com/site/linuxscooter/linux/backups/tap... https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_storage_devices/managing-tape-devices_managing-storage-devices https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... https://access.redhat.com/solutions/68115 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/68115 That is, unfortunately, essentially the apex of LTO tape documentation in 2022, as far as I can tell. Do note that in terms of tape standards, LTO-5 is an important threshold because that's where LTFS support got added, and that's the closest thing to a "normal" filesystem abstraction that's available for tape (sort of like packet-formatted CDRWs I guess, in the sense of presenting an abstraction over the raw seekable block device). There is also very little documentation on init, care, and feeding of LTFS iirc - and again, it would be nice to know any pitfalls that might cause shoeshining and tape death. Although I suppose in practice it's mostly going to get used more in a "multi session" scenario where you mostly aren't deleting files, you write till it's full and then maybe wipe the whole tape at once, and it's just a nice abstraction to allow the abstraction of "files" rather than sequential records (tape archives/TARs, in fact!) along an opaque track with no contextualization.