One of my clients is looking at replacing their aging LTO-2 environment with LTO-4 drives. However, for reasons of cost, they are looking at going from an 16 drive LTO-2 environment to just a 4 drive LTO-4 environment. LTO-4 has been chosen since it can read LTO-2 tapes. However, the question they have (and I'd be grateful if anyone has real-world experience of a similar scenario) is regarding the scenario of restoring a multi-streamed Oracle backup.
If an Oracle backup has been multi-streamed to 8 LTO-2 drives, what will happen if they try to restore from the 4 LTO-4 drives instead (LTO-2 library now decommissioned but LTO-2 tapes inserted into LTO-4 library)? Will the restore work (and just take longer - changing tapes as it goes) or will it fail (since it can't load 8 tapes simultaneously)? Are there any options to "trick" data protector into allowing the restore (e.g. via changing the original device selection in the restore context menu) or will the restore simply not work unless 8 LTO-4 drives are available at the start of the restore? Given the cost of the LTO-4 drives, it's not something the client wants to consider paying for unless absolutely necessary.
Thanks,
Chris