kk downing wrote:
>
> I am confused how are they different media types 
> if they are both DLT format tapes?
>
   You're not confused at all: they _are_ the same kind of physical media.
   The choice is offered so that if you want to keep some of your tapes
separate from others, you can define them as dlt instead of dlt2. (This
distinction is like Volume Groups: no real difference, just an
organizational technique.)
   For example, say you have a robot with four DLT8000 drives and forty tape
slots. You can define one drive as dlt2 and the other three drives as dlt.
Perhaps you decide to add ten tapes will as dlt2 and the other thirty as
dlt; when a job is sent to the dlt2 drive, it won't use any of the thirty
dlt tapes. You could take advantage of this to keep backups of the same
renention period but different uses from mingling on the same tape: handy
for off-siting, for instance.
    Really, it's not a big deal (unless you want to do this and couldn't!).
Just use dlt and pretend that dlt2 ad dlt3 don't exist. :7)
-wde
P.S. If I'm wrong, could someone please correct me?
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI