I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about LTFS technology.  The questions vary widely from “what is it?” to “what is Quantum doing about it?” to “how does LTFS solve world hunger?”  OK – perhaps I took some liberties with that last question.

Because of the volume of inquiries, and the power of the technology, I thought I would start by answering the first question (what is it?) in less than 210 words.

According to the LTO consortium, LTFS stands for “Linear Tape File System”.  And it is just that; it is a file system that facilitates self-describing tape cartridges, which opens up a world of new possibilities for using tape for primary or archive storage.

LTFS works by creating two partitions on a tape cartridge.  One of these partitions is used for storing the location and descriptive information (metadata) of the actual data or content, which in turn is stored in the second partition.  So for LTFS you need: (1) a tape drive that can support two partitions on tape, and (2) software that can write LTFS metadata and content to these partitions.

With that in place, it is easy to understand how software can now quickly be aware of what is on a tape cartridge just by reading the first partition, which might only take seconds or minutes, rather than the historical process of reading the whole tape, which can take hours.  And given that the metadata is written in an open standard XML format, any application can interact with LTFS data to provide a seamless, enhanced user interface to make tape as easy to work with as other removable storage technologies like DVDs, thumb-drives, or removable disk drives.

This may not do much for you if all you are looking to do is store album art for the songs you have loaded on your iPod, but if you are storing a lot of very large files like high-definition or 3-D movies, or geospatial data, or medical imaging data, or surveillance or facial recognition data, LTFS is a revolutionary enabler for you.

With LTFS, applications and users can have easier access to data files.  Because of that, more applications will emerge.  Because of that, users will have higher confidence in LTFS as a data format of choice.  And because of that, LTFS cartridges will be more highly adopted for low-cost and long-term data storage.

And who knows? Perhaps LTFS tape will be used in applications designed for people working on solving world hunger.