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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 :)

The Next Revolution

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Harry Lipnick

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We need a more affordable and easier to use long term backup solution than either LTO or Blu-Ray optical (and obviously hard drives) can provide right now. As my hard drives continue to fill up, and I start planning on having a Scarlet and hours and hours of RED media within the next year, I've been looking at investing in an LTO solution. Frankly, it's just too expensive. Other than cost, it's everything I want...a fairly cheap media that is stable and I can store for long periods...so it's all good, except that the drives cost as much as the computer I'm typing this on right now.
So, whether it's RED, Apple, or some new visionaries on the horizon, someone needs to bring to market (and soon, please) the Scarlet-price-point long term storage solution. I know I'll be the first customer, and I think there will be plenty in line behind me. This is a new frontier, but a logical one with all the data we can create so quickly with these cameras. So, who's got something new hiding up there sleeves?
Peace,

-Harry
 
LTO is a pretty good bet though Harry. A small drive isn't that expensive when you consider what you're using it too do. Admittiedly it's not the most straight forward media to access and write too.

But most importantly, LTO is used in many other walks of life where vasts ammounts of data are being stored such as banking. As an archiving format having something that'll continue to be used across many boards for years to come and be backward compatible is invaluable. Having industry standards is often a good thing even if it isn't the perfect product at the perfect price point.

Paul
 
Yeah- what's too expensive. You're talking $3k-6K for a decent LTO-4 deck and tapes are $50-100. And that's solid backup that can be read at a variety of service bureaus. I don't see how that's too expensive when we're in the league of a $17,500 base price camera body. My stuff's worth that much. :)

Noah
 
Get LTO, not Blu-Ray or any other optical format including Holographic(as of now).
 
PaulClements said:
LTO is a pretty good bet though Harry. A small drive isn't that expensive when you consider what you're using it too do. Admittiedly it's not the most straight forward media to access and write too.

But most importantly, LTO is used in many other walks of life where vasts ammounts of data are being stored such as banking. As an archiving format having something that'll continue to be used across many boards for years to come and be backward compatible is invaluable. Having industry standards is often a good thing even if it isn't the perfect product at the perfect price point.

Paul
Click to expand...

Right on Paul. If I wasn't clear, I'm all about the LTO technology itself...it's perfect really for what I'm trying to do. Just a price point that at the moment still stings a little, without a whole lot of obvious alternatives.


Noah Kadner said:
Yeah- what's too expensive. You're talking $3k-6K for a decent LTO-4 deck and tapes are $50-100. And that's solid backup that can be read at a variety of service bureaus. I don't see how that's too expensive when we're in the league of a $17,500 base price camera body. My stuff's worth that much. :)

Noah
Click to expand...

Noah, of course $3,000 is not highway robbery or anything, but we are getting to the point where we're going to have cameras in that same price range but which will still produce as much (if not more) data than the $17,500 camera. Maybe some enterprising company needs to buy a bunch of LTO drives, and just rent them out to people for a week at a time. I certainly don't need the drive sitting around full time...
Peace,

-Harry
 
If $3k is a lot of money for an individual then the solution seems to me just buying $500 worth of HDDs which will get them 7.5TB of HDDs divide by 2 (for redundancy) and you get 3.75TB of storage. That's a LOT of redcode.

3,750,000MB/30MBs/60sec/60min = 37.5 hours of backup.

Another $250 will buy you an offsite copy. Plus another $50 a year will get you an online backup like Carbonite.
 
Carbonite isn't going to be a realistic solution for backup for this kind of work. They will even tell you that while there is no limit to the storage capacity offered by their service, the process of uploading the amount of data over current transmission avenues, is not realistically practical. I was in the process of backing up my laptop using Carbonite and on my "screaming" DSL upload, it has taken two days to get to 1GB of data uploaded. Only 48GB left to go and she'll be through with the initial backup. At that rate, it'll take about three months.
 
An LTO4 is £1250 in the UK and in a autoloader about £4500, software is £300 to drive it. A managed automated system would cost about £6000 plus the tape auto loader, so about £10,500 all up. You can also run dual headed LTO's. I don't see any other realistic option right now.

SR was £68,000 when I last looked and wont do half of what an LTO4 properly set up can do.
 
LTO is cheap compared to most stuff in this industry.

Bear in mind that the prime users are banks and other financial institutions, promoting both economies of scale and long terms service and support. This is vital for a viable long term storage solution.
 
Apologies for the minor hijack here- can anyone recommend a good LTO for use with a MAc Pro? I hadn't heard of an LTO until just a few minutes ago, and I'm assimilating info as fast as I can, but a specific recommendation would be great. Burning to archival DVDs is just painful.
 
As much as I agree that LTO4 is a reasonably priced backup device I'm troubled by they fact that:

There seems to be no 'archive' oriented software available for any price.

I'm finding fudging archiving out of retrospect on MAC and LTO4 problematic and flakey. Definitely not a 'solution'!

Anyone got a 'solution' I don't know about?

regards

Michael L
 
Harry Lipnick said:
Maybe some enterprising company needs to buy a bunch of LTO drives, and just rent them out to people for a week at a time. I certainly don't need the drive sitting around full time...
Peace,

-Harry
Click to expand...

There are post houses that will handle this for you.
 
I wouldn't go to a post or dub house. They'll charge you $300 to plug in your hard drive.

I would imagine a rental house would be better. With all these data cameras out and about now I imagine you can rent an LTO deck along with the camera package for pretty cheap. Just back up right on set.
 
Think about this for a second...

Look at the price of a hardrive (or two for redundancy) as a means for archival. I did this when I was Operations mananger at a company. We would mirror the data on two drives then store one at our post house and one at our offsite storage (in fire proof water proof safe with metal strap binders). We also did LTO (kept onsight in a safe). At one point after two years of doing this my boss asked "do we really need to do LTO?".... I said no.

I felt the odds of both drives being incapacitated were very unlikely.

Two years ago I worked at one of Iron Side facilities that store a bunch of one of the big majors recording and video footage... guess what the new thing was for archival (at least at that huge wharehouse in Van Nuys) was? Cheap (not bottom basemeant but cheap) Firewire drives.

OR

If not go in on the cost of a "NEW" LTO with 3 or 4 friends that you trust and decide or draw straws to see who's place it resides at. I have done this before, but only with people I trust and know will give me precedence on the equipment when they are not in crunch time on a billable job.

Food for thought, times are a changing, just... like anything else, have a 10/15 year archival transfer cycle in place. It will save your ass.
 
I agree that, with their cost being so low, hard drives are a great way to go these days for shops that cant afford something else.

We use open, cartridge-style, eSATA docks and keep the 3.5" drives in WiebeTech cases. They sit on shelves, just like/next to tape.

We need to read the drives at least once a year (technically two or so, but what's wrong with being safe) so the drive itself can repair any sectors with a weakened magnetic signal.

Each bit of data (pun intended) is copied to two drives.

So far so good.

The docking system also lets anyone renting a room/suite have an easy way to take and bring their data with them.

(So we don't have to charge $300 to plug your drive in. ;) )
 
Harry Lipnick said:
We need a more affordable and easier to use long term backup solution than either LTO or Blu-Ray optical (and obviously hard drives) can provide right now. As my hard drives continue to fill up, and I start planning on having a Scarlet and hours and hours of RED media within the next year, I've been looking at investing in an LTO solution. Frankly, it's just too expensive. Other than cost, it's everything I want...a fairly cheap media that is stable and I can store for long periods...so it's all good, except that the drives cost as much as the computer I'm typing this on right now.
So, whether it's RED, Apple, or some new visionaries on the horizon, someone needs to bring to market (and soon, please) the Scarlet-price-point long term storage solution. I know I'll be the first customer, and I think there will be plenty in line behind me. This is a new frontier, but a logical one with all the data we can create so quickly with these cameras. So, who's got something new hiding up there sleeves?
Peace,

-Harry
Click to expand...

I THINK RED ALREADY DOES HAVE THIS SOLUTION IN THE PIPELINE (oops cap lock, not yelling)

and its called RED RAY :)
 
Tim Whitcomb said:
I THINK RED ALREADY DOES HAVE THIS SOLUTION IN THE PIPELINE (oops cap lock, not yelling)

and its called RED RAY :)
Click to expand...

Red Ray has nothing to do with data storage. It's a delivery system for a heavily compressed version of the final picture.
 
Petros Kolyvas said:
I agree that, with their cost being so low, hard drives are a great way to go these days for shops that cant afford something else.
Click to expand...

Affordability is not really the issue. An 800GB LTO4 cartridge costs about $60, less than the current cost of a 1 TB hard drive. The cost of the LTO4 drive can be covered in a few months' use. The biggest issue in using LTO4 is that there is no "native" format, so you must decide on what backup software to use - and for recovery, the same software must be available. That is why there is very little direct interchange between facilities with LTO formats, although it is certainly possible with proper planning.

(So we don't have to charge $300 to plug your drive in. ;) )
Click to expand...

Neither does anyone else. That comment was clearly coming from someone who has very little experience with "real" post facilities - or it was just an outrageous exaggeration.
 
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