openLTO

openLTO is an open and neutral set of Bash scripts for handling LTO (Linear Tape-Open) cartridges of generation from 5 to 9, formatted in LTFS, on the most current drives from HPE, IBM and Tandberg Data, on recent versions of Linux, including on Windows, and macOS. It supports either openLTFS or numerous current LTFS implementations.

The openLTO package is released under a 3-Clause BSD License and is provided “as is” without warranty or support of any kind. The source code will become freely available, as soon as a public beta will be released. A PDF of the current man page is available.

Our clients can already install, test and actually use a private beta by running the following two commands in the Terminal, after connecting to our extranet:

brew tap avpres/formulae
brew install openlto

The Homebrew formula was successfully tested on various modern x86-64 and AArch64 architectures, running under the following operating systems:

• Linux: Debian 12.10 and 11.11; Ubuntu 25.04, 24.04.2 LTS, 22.04.5 LTS and 20.04.6 LTS; Slackware 15.0
• Macintosh: macOS 15.4.1, 14.7.5 and 13.7.5
• Windows: 11 version 24H2, 23H2 and 22H2, running Terminal or Subsystem for Linux

The Change Log file is available.

Table of Contents

Basic Scripts

• listlto – List the available LTO desks.
• selectlto – Select an LTO desk to use.
• loadlto – Load an LTO cartridge into a desk.
• formatlto – Format an LTO cartridge with LTFS.
• mountlto – Mount an LTO cartridge which is loaded in a desk.
• writelto – Write data from the computer onto a mounted LTO cartridge.
• readlto – Read data from a mounted LTO cartridge to the computer.
• unmountlto – Unmount the LTO cartridge from a desk.
• ejectlto – Eject an LTO cartridge from a desk.

The set of basic scripts above may also be used for building more complex scripts such as the ones in the following two sections:

Intermediate Scripts

• indexlto – Establish the full index of an LTO cartridge.
• copylto – Copy the content of one LTO cartridge onto another LTO cartridge.
• verifylto – Verify the integrity of an LTO cartridge.
• searchlto – Search a string or a regex over the full content of an LTO cartridge.
• migratelto – Migrate one or more LTO cartridges from one generation to another.
• recoverlto – Recover content by using back-up from an LTO cartridge.

Advanced Scripts

• repairlto – [Try to] repair a damaged LTO cartridge.

2025-04-30