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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Is LTO the way to go for backup and archive?

S

Scott Pultz

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Hello, I have been lurking for awhile and reading what I can. Please welcome me to this amazing resource :) My question is about backing up and archiving many TB of raw footage offsite. Right now I have cloud storage (multiple targets) for my data files, photos, etc. However this just isn't a reasonable solution for raw footage due to the sizes involved. So right now I'm considering LTO tape or perhaps external USB drives that I move between locations. The benefits of tape is that the media is cheap enough that I can just box them up once in awhile and send them to a family member in another state. The drawbacks is that on other forums I am getting "tape is horrible, don't use it!" without much explanation. I don't need random access. This is for disaster recovery (fire, theft, earth quake) so what I need is reliability. Thoughts?
 
There is a very good reason that major broadcast networks, corporations, financial institutions and government agencies use LTO tape.

It has proven itself to be a secure, stable and economically affordable means of backing up data.
The fact that each new generation of the technology is able to read back two generations fits right in with the "disaster recovery" scenario you refer to.

Those that raise warning flags without explanation are simply not in possession of evidence that would bolster their claims.
 
Thanks Brian!

I am looking at Tandberg, Quantum, and HP drives. From the outside they all look almost identical but with the HP drive costing roughly $1000 more. Does anybody know what the difference is with the HP?
 
Scott Pultz said:
Thanks Brian!

I am looking at Tandberg, Quantum, and HP drives. From the outside they all look almost identical but with the HP drive costing roughly $1000 more. Does anybody know what the difference is with the HP?
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Quantum and Tandberg work fine. Ive also got a Tandberg carousel with HP drives in side it so Ive no idea why the HP box costs more or is or is not different.
 
Be sure that you are comparing oranges to oranges.
Might be the connection type, internal vs. external, any one of a number of minor differences.
Or, could be the LTO generation. Are you looking at LTO-5 or LTO-6?
While 6 is the most recent generation with double the capacity of 5, the price premium on tape and the unit itself may steer you to using 5 for now.
Remember, each new release will read two generations back, so a choice to purchase 5 today will be easy to migrate once LTO-7 comes out.
If you are not storing petabytes of data, you will definitely get a better return on investment with LTO-5.

I have HP myself. Can attest to the reliability.
Best to let owners of the other brands contribute their own opinions.
 
Dave Blackham said:
Quantum and Tandberg work fine. Ive also got a Tandberg carousel with HP drives in side it so Ive no idea why the HP box costs more or is or is not different.
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Looks like you have a good endorsement for Tandberg equipment!

Dave, I'm looking at adding a multiple drive/tape library onto my fibre network - have you been using yours as an accessible library with LTFS or just as a backup system?
 
I use LTO to create daily archives for broadcast commercials as well as studio movies and television productions. Most studio projects require LTO archival for insurance purposes (plus, its just a good practice, period).

I've been very pleased with the integrated solutions offered by the Tolis Group. I currently have a Tolis Group LTO-6 Ultrium deck bundled with their BRU PE software (it can also do LTFS) and it's been a robust, rock-solid package. Reads and writes to both LTO-6 and LTO-5 tapes. My unit is expandable to allow for a 2nd deck, which I plan to add soon.

You can certainly create your own solution from scratch, but I have to say, the time-savings and outstanding support by Tolis Group made their product worth every penny.

Best,

- Jordan
 
short answer; yes, definitely!

I've seen like 2-3 corrupt DLT-tapes already, but 90% of it could be recovered and that was out of a number of like 300 DLT tapes... when I think of the dead spinning disks (harddrives) or bad RAID's over time this is a pretty good number (way more data lost on conventional spinning drives then on tape!)...

Been on LTO-4 for a long time, switched to LTO-6 just recently :)
 
Thanks everybody! Due to the media cost I was thinking of using LTO-5 tapes. Not sure if I will buy an LTO-5 or LTO-6 drive though for when LTO-6 tapes get cheaper compared to LTO-5.
 
I had a spinning drive get knocked off a desk and brick and 1 Tb of data vanished. Luckily it wasn't anything that was close to important but I did switch to LTO-5 right away. The tapes have been rock solid dependable.

You might want to look at the appliances from Cache-A or 1beyond.com. I was having a little problem with the LTFS drivers on my Win7/64 machine when just using a drive, I went with a Prime Cache 5 from Cache-A and it is dead simple to use and their built in software auto-catalogs every tape you put into the drive and makes a searchable database for you so your footage later on.
 
Paul J Steinberg said:
I had a spinning drive get knocked off a desk and brick and 1 Tb of data vanished. Luckily it wasn't anything that was close to important but I did switch to LTO-5 right away. The tapes have been rock solid dependable.

You might want to look at the appliances from Cache-A or 1beyond.com. I was having a little problem with the LTFS drivers on my Win7/64 machine when just using a drive, I went with a Prime Cache 5 from Cache-A and it is dead simple to use and their built in software auto-catalogs every tape you put into the drive and makes a searchable database for you so your footage later on.
Click to expand...

Those look like great products, they are just out of my price range unfortunately.
 
I have 14 years worth of dlt and 4 years of lto. To be honest it's the secret to my success. The reason being that I can restore footage or a project within a couple of hours. If there was something better then I would own it. If you go down the lto path then bru is I compromised.

Pm me if you want more info
 
+1 again here.

Another thing to consider is which platform you are running on, that will dictate which drives and hardware will work best for you. Currently the HP LTO drives, usually paired with ATTO host controllers, are the most compatible with Mac systems and are still a wonderful combo on Windows and Linux. If you're primarily running Windows, you pretty much have the ability to pick any drive/ combo you want.

Tandberg (formerly ExaByte) does not seem to be making their own LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape drive mechanisms, only the enclosures and autoloaders. I would steer you toward the HP LTO-6 "desktop" unit unless you had specific needs for automation of larger tape volumes. For larger things, Tandberg is a great choice. Also look at Spectra.

Tolis Group is definitely a company to look at if you're running this on a Mac. They have the best Mac software in the form of BRU PE (or BRU Server for larger setups and multi-platform setups). They sell very nice kits with tape drives. IMO, if I were to buy an LTO-6 "desktop" unit, I would buy from them because they put it in their own enclosure, which is rather quiet for desktop use and seems well made. The fan in the standard HP units sounds like a fighter jet taking off. I've told the guys at HP this several times, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Somewhat of a product blunder, IMO. You don't design something for "desktop" use and make it loud enough that people can hear it down the hall, around a corner and in another room with all doors shut in between. Then again, the tape mechanism itself is rather loud and somewhat "whiney" when actually working.
 
I've been using LTO since tape died for me with the delivery of the RedOne in 2008.

I started with LTO-3 and now work with LTO-5. While LTO-3 had not enough capacity for meaningful R3D backup, LTO-4 was ok and now LTO-5 is fast and large enough to work also for Autodesk Smoke archives that easily reach sizes of 3 and more TB for 45 min. shows.

I have an Quantum SAS LTO-5 tape-drive and use BRU-PE as the backup software. BRU is easy to understand, reliable and works as expected. In LTO-3 times I made very bad experiences with Retrospect. May be that this changed to the better but with BRU-PE I'm well served and have no reason to change.

My advice: For a small facility (1 Epic, 2 NLE seats, compositing, grading finishing) a single LTO-5 tape-drive connected via SAS to a MacPro will do it satisfyingly and is pretty cost effective.

The solutions by the Tolisgroup are worth to check out. They don't need further investigations by the user like which SAS card to buy (nit all work well), etc... and are plug'n play.

Hans
 
Retrospect software is still garbage. :(

BRU is tops on the Mac. On Windows there are several to pick from and I wouldn't be too picky as long as it fits your archiving and cataloging needs. Just be sure it supports creating open LTFS, which is relatively new and supported by LTO-5 and up. If the tapes are written in LTFS, the data should be accessible, regardless of system used. Now, as to which format the archive itself is written as and how proprietary it is becomes another issue entirely. That is one of the current issues with the archival industry is the decades of proprietary formats. It seems the industry is finally trying to move beyond that.
 
I am on a Windows machine and plan to stay that way due to other uses I have for it. Apparently BRU is coming out in a Windows version in the coming months.

It would be nice to know if the drive will work with my coming Adaptec card in Windows or if I need a second SAS HBA card installed. Would rather not give up the slot if I don't have to!
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Retrospect software is still garbage. :(

BRU is tops on the Mac. .... Just be sure it supports creating open LTFS....
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If all that one wants to do is write data to LTFS formatted LTO5 tapes, you don't need anything beyond the drive itself and LTFS software, which is free. If you use an HP drive, you can download HP's Storeopen Standalone software, which has a nice, simple GUI front end that will let you format and mount LTFS tapes. From there you can either drag and drop using the Finder, or use command line tools like rsync. Of course, verifying the tapes and keeping track of what's where then becomes your responsibility. But that's always been the case with other formats, be they optical disks, floppies, hard drives, or anything else.
 
Whats the difference between an HP drives and a Tandberg/Quantum drive besides about $1000? They look fairly identical.
 
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