In the Media & Entertainment world, LTO has fast become the “forever home” for projects and footage. A 30-year tape life, as touted by the LTO Consortium (IBM, HP & Quantum), sounds reassuring - right up until you try to find a healthy LTO-5 drive a few generations down the line.

It's a beautiful promise, but the truth is this: tape archives don't age, but drives do.

While it's not hard to store tapes safely, keeping electronics in good shape to be used once in maybe a decade is a daunting task, if not impossible. If you’re not actively migrating archives from older tapes to newer generations once in a while, you’re effectively betting on hardware that’s already end of life. The solution: a hands-off Migration option, now available in Canister Pro for Windows.

Shoe-shining

“What’s the big deal?” I hear you cry. That's typical when you've never manually attempted migrating a tape. Let's put it like this: one does not simply migrate from one LTO-tape to another. Not without a whole heap of mechanical pain that's called shoe-shining. Shoe-shining occurs when a tape isn't fed enough data to write, and thus it overshoots the tape, having to rewind the tape to write the next sector, overshoots again, and so forth. All of that isn't great for the wear of your tape, so it should be prevented where possible.

Without getting too far into the weeds, the solution is to decouple the data stream between the two tape drives, keeping the slower reading (source) drive from starving the much faster writing (destination) drive.

In order to do this, Canister uses a clever pre-read and cache mechanism that allows each device to operate on its own ideal terms. To do so, migrating a tape is best done by designating a cache drive - a flash-based boot drive with enough space to accommodate at least the largest file on your source tape, but more is better.

Before you ask, yes, it is possible to set the cache location to an external drive. As a rule of thumb, a good-quality external SSD connected via USB-C or Thunderbolt will be sufficient for most use cases.

But wait, there's more!

The team has been super busy behind the scenes, not just landing support for both Project Licenses and Offline Activation, but also a slick new paint job to keep things looking fresh.

When can I get it?

Canister for Windows 25.4 is available now via in-app update, or download a fresh copy on the Releases page.

The Canister Team