Life span of the LTO Cleaning Tape

Many IT personnel/specialist didn't really know when to use the Tape Backup Unit (TBU) cleaning tape. If you google about this topic, I'm pretty sure you can't find any exact instruction about this but only some suggestion from many experienced IT specialist.

For me, I will suggest you to clean the TBU at least once in a fortnight. If you are a heavy user, and every day you need to backup at last 400GB of data, then you might need to consider clean it at least once in a week.

Few weeks ago, I noticed even some of the IT personnel did schedule the drive cleaning, but they didn't know how many times that a cleaning tape can be used, and they just keep cleaning the drive with a cleaning media which already exceed its life span.

Please take a look from the below description:

An LTO cleaning cartridge can be used approximately 50 times, and the inventory count shows 50 cleans remaining until you load the tape into a drive for the first time. An SDLT-320 cleaning cartridge can be used approximately 20 times

For more information, you may refers to below URL:

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/stor-sys/132TLTO2/en/ug_tl/faq.htm