LTO-8 was not a complete new generation. It was a halt implemented intermediate step only...

So you have to compare with LTO-7

I don’t know if this was announced at Veeam Live or not as if so I’d completely missed it, but I think it’s awesome we now have this Tape Cloning functionality on the way. It was funny to read about this forward planning for when it would actually be required and seeing that amount of road mapping at an execution level.

Tape Cloning?

I am afraid I have missed this up to now… Do you have some more information on this topic?

I’ll copy paste from the latest word from Gostev:

“Time flies and suddenly, LTO-9 is just around the corner! IBM has kindly provided us access to their LTO-9 hardware lab, and after performing the required testing we confirmed that Veeam Backup & Replication 10a is fully compatible with this new standard right out of the box – no code changes are required. Since I know many customers have skipped LTO-8 altogether due to its availability situation caused by Fuji/Sony patent dispute, it will be an awesome upgrade for many from 6TB to whopping 18TB of raw capacity per cartridge! Some will probably want to migrate their archives from older generation tapes to LTO-9, and that's where Veeam Backup & Replication v11 will shine with its new tape cloning feature. While the primary use case for this feature is "refreshing" your archived tape media periodically as recommend by best practices, it also supports cloning between different generations with the migration use case in mind.

By the way, the whole story of this tape cloning feature may make you smile. Some customers keep giving us hard times for still not having this functionality in the product, but there's actually a logic behind this. When we decided not to OEM our tape support, and instead develop it from the ground up internally, we knew it will require many years to deliver all features available in those seasoned tape backup products. So we really had to think hard while prioritizing features – and the tape cloning was one feature I immediately pushed way out. My argument to the team was that we don't really need to deliver this before the time comes for the first tapes written by Veeam to be refreshed for further storage – which buys us time to focus on more pressing needs. Well, guess what: now that the first Veeam tapes are getting over 5 years in storage, we're delivering the ability to refresh them, just as we planned!”

Hope this helps @JMeixner