We recently have had one heck of a hard time with a particular
configuration for DLT's and I wanted to warn everyone so that they don't
have the same problem.

We had been using Orbit backup on our main system, and had the DLT
configured as a DDS device as Orbit recommends.  This works just fine.
When our development system came in the DLT was once again configured as a
DDS, but we didn't use Orbit, just basic STORE.  The STORE was faithfully
reporting that it had stored everything day after day in our full backups,
then we had a drive crash and had to reload from the backup.  Guess what?
only about half the tape can be read.  There has been no way to recover
that data.  We converted it to a DLT drive and were able to restore even
less data from the tape.

We finally just bought Orbit for the development system as well so that we
could have a backup we could rely on, but I understand that it is a fairly
common practice to configure the DLT drives with the DDS drivers so that
you can have fast seek and such.

Good Luck,

Shawn