Data access using the Spectrum Archive index

How to access data on a medium using the IBM Spectrum Archive™ index.

Spectrum Archive Library Edition is an application that presents a tape medium as if it were a file system on a disk drive. Standard operating system facilities and other applications can access the data using standard file system calls.

See the topic Supported tape drives and media for the tape drives that Spectrum Archive Library Edition supports. Spectrum Archive relies on the capability of the supported tape drives to handle partitioned tape media. Spectrum Archive operates the tape media using two partitions: the index partition containing the file system metadata, or index data, and the partition containing the file content itself. Figure 1 shows data from the index partition being read into main memory. Figure 2 shows index data in main memory being used to access files on the data partition. The index partition also can be used as cache for quick access to specific files, as determined by the user during formatting.

Figure 1. Index partition data being read into main memory

Figure 2. Index data in main memory being used to access files in the data partition

In Linux and Windows environments, the Spectrum Archive Library Edition utility ltfsadmintool is used with the -f option to format media. The utility ltfsadmintool with the -c option is used to verify media consistency and to recover media from an inconsistent state. Refer to the topics Formatting a medium in the library and Checking and recovering or rolling back a medium in the library in the Related information section to learn more about these operations.