When investigating LTO drive or media faults, it is often necessary to collect the logs (also known as "dumps") from the LTO drive itself.

For this purpose we have created a basic macOS-only tool for easy collection of these Drive Dumps, a link to the tool is included in this article.


Follow these steps for collecting a drive dump and supplying them to Global Support Tech Support:

  1. Eject any tapes currently mounted
  2. Quit all LTFS applications (YoYotta, Canister, Tiger Bridge, etc...)
  3. Download the zip file (GDTape-DriveDumpCollector.zip) to your Mac connected to the LTO drive
  4. Double-click the downloaded zip file to extract the application
  5. Double-click the application (GDTape-DriveDumpCollector) to launch it
  6. Choose from the list (there may only be 1 item in the list) the Serial Number of your LTO drive
  7. The application will now collect the drive logs, saving them to a folder on your Desktop folder named: GD-Tape-Dump
  8. The application will notify you when the log collection has completed and instruct you to create a zip file of the GD-Tape-Dump folder and send it via your preferred file transfer service (e.g. WeTransfer) and notify us at:
    1. support@globaldistribution.com
  9. When we have the drive dump, we'll analyse it and get back to you with our findings.