BRU Producer's Edition Available, Special for RED Forum Members

[Tim Jones]

Hi Folks,

I don't want to come off as too salesy with this, but I am very proud to announce that BRU Producer's Edition for Mac OS X is available starting Feb 27, 2009 at 9 AM MST - go to www.productionbackup.com for complete information. You can download a fully functional, 30 day demo.

Pricing is $499 per system license and $199 for 1 year of support with free updates during the support period. We also have quantity pricing for multiple seats within the same company. Ask our sales team for more information if you need more than 3 or 4 licenses.

However, because many of you in the RED world are supporting us through this, between tomorrow and March 15th, by identifying yourself as a RED Forum member, your price will be $399.

Thanks for all of the input that we've received during the BETA period. Without your input, BRU PE wouldn't even exist. While we've been at this since 1985, our team looks forward to supporting all of your workflow archival needs for many years to come. Check it out and see just how easy asset archival to tape can be.

Tim

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Tim, thanks for sharing the info with us. Even though you are selling a product, it doesn't hurt to have the technical knowledge here as a resource. I'm in the market for a backup system and trying to do as much research as possible, so I appreciate the threads that get into the nuts and bolts of topics like this.

 

[Shane Betts]

Hi Tim

What's the difference between Producer's Edition and Server? We have 7 workstations (3 of which are edit systems) and a server to backup. We post Red, P2, XDCam, Digibeta, etc. Which do we need?

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi Tim,

In the moment I'm tesing BruPE.

I come from years of Retrospect suffering, so please forgive my assumptions how backups should/could work...

1. In the Archive mode I see the backups I performed. Each archive has a new name. There are some archives I just did for test purposes. How can I delete them? Is there any possibility to manage/rename/delete them manually?

2. Considering I made a backup of a job I currently work on. I've got new data that I want to add to this particular job. How can I add data to an extisting archive?

3. Considering l lost my system. How can I resurrect the archives of my tapes?

4. Year 2050. I need files from a tape of 2009. Tolisgroup has passed away (hopefully not!). How can I be sure that my backups are still readable?

Otherwise the interface is a pleasure to work with. My slightly seasoned stand alone LTO3 SCSI tapedrive is working nicely with BruPE so far. Verifying is fast and does not force the deck to disconnect which happend so often with Retrospect....

Next thing will be an backup and restore over 2 Tapes.

Thanks for giving a discount to redusers!

Hans

 

[Tim Jones]

BRU PE versus BRU Server

BRU PE versus BRU Server

Hi Tim

What's the difference between Producer's Edition and Server? We have 7 workstations (3 of which are edit systems) and a server to backup. We post Red, P2, XDCam, Digibeta, etc. Which do we need?

Hi Shane,

PE is a single-seat solution that is designed to make it very easy for an average DAW operator to create archives of their work. Drag, Drop, Click... that's it. In fact, here's PE's main "QuickArchive" GUI:

For that shot, I set Separate Session Mode and then dropped in those 6 client folders. All of the tape and archive naming is automated. All that's left is to load a tape and click the "Create Archive" button.

BRU Server, on the other hand, is a more admin-oriented product that's designed for centralized backup of a number of different systems - up to 250 clients per server - depending on your network bandwidth and data volume (we've a couple of customers backing up over 1000 clients with 1 server, but the clients are low-data volumes of a few tens of MB max per day).

So in all honesty, the two products can work together - one providing centralized full enterprise client / server support - the other providing edit bay direct access for archival of assets at the user level.

One of the studios in LA is using Server for their backups to the central office (using a large tape library with 2 LTO-4 drives) and each of 6 edit / ADR bays has a standalone LTO-3 or LTO-4 tape drive with a copy of BRU PE. Everything gets backed up to the server, but the operators are able to create archives local to the project they're working on for easy, local access for recall.

Tim

 

[Tim Jones]

Warning - long-winded response below

Warning - long-winded response below

Hi Tim,

In the moment I'm tesing BruPE.

I come from years of Retrospect suffering, so please forgive my assumptions how backups should/could work...

1. In the Archive mode I see the backups I performed. Each archive has a new name. There are some archives I just did for test purposes. How can I delete them? Is there any possibility to manage/rename/delete them manually?

Again, I don't want to turn this into a BRU support forum, but you can select the archive in the restore panel and hit the Backspace or delete key to remove the record.

2. Considering I made a backup of a job I currently work on. I've got new data that I want to add to this particular job. How can I add data to an extisting archive?

The simplest path is

• Go into advanced mode
• Select the parent folder(s) for your project
• Save the job definition
• Select that job definition from the popup menu
• Select the "Incremental" entry in the "Type" popup menu
• Select the job that you saved from the "Base Job" popup menu
• Save this new job with a new name

Now, the incremental and full jobs will be available from the QuickArchive mode Job popup menu. After you've created your initial Full archive of the data, you can select the Incremental job from that popup menu and then append the newly modified data to the original tape. Unlike Retrospect, BRU maintains each archive as a separate entity rather than polluting your previous archives. This provides two very important differentiators- the lose or corruption of one archive has no affect on the restorability of the other archives, and you can select to go back a revision (or more) by simply restoring from the older archive. BTW - BRU PE will automatically handle multi-tape situations and once you're satisfied with your work for that project, creating a new full archive of the complete project is as easy as loading the full job for that data and running a new archive.

3. Considering l lost my system. How can I resurrect the archives of my tapes?

There are three things that need to be considered:

1. Are we talking about loosing just the asset data?
2. Are we talking about loosing just the system (OS and Apps) data
3. Are we talking everything?

Each requires a different type of backup from which to recover. So, if you are using BRU PE to provide support for all three scenarios, I'd recommend two distinct backup / archive operations and one workflow recommendation.

1. Create a Job that backs up your primary system (root) drive
   You could also use our bruCLONE tool to completely clone your volume to a separate USB/FW/Internal drive
2. Create a job that backs up your non-system data
3. Using a USB Flash Drive, regularly copy the contents of /private/var/lib/bru/Tapes and /private/var/lib/bru/Archives onto the Flash drive.

While that last step isn't a must, and it will be an option in the 2.1 update that we're already working on (you will be able to import your archives easily with the standalone BRU Import tool that's being prepped for release this week), it will make things even easier to re-recognize your archives.

For the actual restore process, (if you've created a bruCLONE of your system drive, it's even easier and you can probably bypass steps 1-4):

1. Get your system back to a state where you can reinstall BRU PE
2. Re-copy your Archives and Tapes folders from the USB flash drive
3. Restore your Full System backup in full overwrite restore mode
4. Restore any incrementals needed to bring things up to the latest level
5. Restore your assets

4. Year 2050. I need files from a tape of 2009. Tolisgroup has passed away (hopefully not!). How can I be sure that my backups are still readable?

Since you're a member of NARAS (you are, aren't you ???), you will be able to request the last version of the complete BRU source code via our source code escrow agreement with that organization. Therefore, in the event TOLIS Group does go away, you'll still have access to the product so long as NARAS is active.

Also, unlike most of the other guys, each new release of BRU is designed specifically to be able to restore older archives. In fact, we have a 150MB QIC Cartridge tape from 1988. If the current version of BRU can't recover the data from that tape, we've broken something and we fix it before the new version is released.

Otherwise the interface is a pleasure to work with. My slightly seasoned stand alone LTO3 SCSI tapedrive is working nicely with BruPE so far. Verifying is fast and does not force the deck to disconnect which happend so often with Retrospect....

Next thing will be an backup and restore over 2 Tapes.

Please also submit any ideas for new features or hmy: problems that you run into. We take our users' feedback VERY seriously.

Thanks for giving a discount to redusers!

Since so many of you have been involved with the design of PE, it's the least we can do. We hope to have all of you join our family of satisfied customers.

Tim

 

[Chris Parker]

i love the looks of this product.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi Tim,

thanks for the insights!

Very helpful, indeed. If I may humbly suggest: You need a manual for dummies, most filmmakers like me a dummies when it comes to IT adminastration.

My question about how to delete an archive is a typical example. More to come... I know the lot.

Kind regards,

Hans

 

[Tim Jones]

Manual is on the way!

Manual is on the way!

Hi Tim,

thanks for the insights!

Very helpful, indeed. If I may humbly suggest: You need a manual for dummies, most filmmakers like me a dummies when it comes to IT adminastration.

We didn't want to hold up the product just because our docs team has slow fingers .

My question about how to delete an archive is a typical example. More to come... I know the lot.

And the more questions we get, the better the docs and tutorial movies will be, so keep 'em coming!

Tim

 

[Tim Jones]

Another important feature of our products that I keep forgetting to mention - we don't require that you exit your other apps to create your archives. You can start a BRU PE or BRU Server job, hide it, and continue working in Avid, FCP, Pro Tools, or whatever and the archive operation will continue running without interfering with your "real" work.

Tim

 

[warwickt]

i love the looks of this product.

Hi Chris, yes BRU-PE is great! I purchased the licence late week from Tolis and I'm up and going production.

I have had some well noted experiences on this and other forums with dealing with relevant SAS HBAs and tape drives. Choose of ATTOTECh and HP Lto4 Ultrium is the way to go for MAC OSX.

Purpose of the post is to say that BRU-PE is excellent for the creative world where we play and also that I will soon have the new MAC PRO 2.93Ghz box Nehalem architecture and will verify the SAS HBA configurations and tape drives with BRU-PE... sould be fine. (ATTO EXRESS SAS R280 and the LSI SAS3442E-R)

Also looking at rpelacing the LSI SAS3442E-R SAS HBA (unsupported on MACS) that I usefo rthe Quantum SAS LTO4 tape drive with a new ATTO TECH EXPRESSAS series "6" 6Ghz that definately drives those dammed quantum tape drives.

Tim has provided a great price for BR-PE for REd users.. $USD100 off retail price I believe..

good luck with BRU-PE

 

[Nick Shaw]

If I understand correctly, I need to remove all trace of Retrospect from my system in order for BRU to work. While BRU PE certainly appeals to me, I am just wondering where it will leave me in terms of my existing archive tapes made with Retrospect. I there a way of accessing data from those using BRU, or maybe Tape Tools?

Also, I currently run Retrospect on a spare G5 machine, connected to an HP LTO-4 using an Atto U320 SCSI card. I run Retrospect Client on my main edit Mac Pro and MacBook Pro to back those up. With BRU PE, will I be able to run BRU on the G5, and simply mount the drive I want to back up over GigE, whichever machine it is physically connected to?

 

[Simon Blackledge]

I'm in the same position Nick. 20 LTO4 tapes from retrospect currently and growing

I like Bru.. I'd like to switch.. but it's looing painful time wise currently :-/

You just need to kill the retrospect deamon apparently.
http://knowledgebase.tolisgroup.com/?View=entry&EntryID=64

As far as client server, after testing yes. Mount the macpro onto the server and backup on the server from connected drives.

Tim a question for you.

Appending jobs is confusing me. Does the new material get added to the archive? or a new one created with just new files?

Why would you create a new job and just select the same job,folder select incremental and archive?

s

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm still in the process of converting all my Retrospect archives over to BRU. Will probably take me another 2 weeks of pecking at it. I think I have 7 or 8 tapes to go. But it's helping me trim some of the fat.

Yeah, and disabling the Retrospect Daemon is a pain in the ass. Soon I will be able to purge my system of its evil.

 

[Tim Jones]

I'm in the same position Nick. 20 LTO4 tapes from retrospect currently and growing

I like Bru.. I'd like to switch.. but it's looing painful time wise currently :-/

You just need to kill the retrospect deamon apparently.
http://knowledgebase.tolisgroup.com/?View=entry&EntryID=64

Unfortunately, the owners of Retrospect are very "possessive" of their proprietary tape format (as are we :innocent: ), so there's no way for us to provide a restore capability for the Retrospect tapes directly. However, if you do need to run Retrospect on that system for historical retrieval, as long as you remember to disable the RetroRun and RetroRunSL daemons before you start using BRU PE again, there will be no conflicts. BRU will not interfere with the operation of Retrospect. Also, we have some users who are restoring their important Retrospect tapes to firewire drives and then re-backing that data up with BRU. An added step, but BRU will not leave you in a situation where

• you can't read older tapes with the current version
• you can't read your existing tapes because you changed platforms.

Appending jobs is confusing me. Does the new material get added to the archive? or a new one created with just new files?

All BRU archives are self-contained entities. An appended set is a separate set of data on the tape. Therefore, if you create a tape and then append 5 other archives, the tape will have 6 physical archives. We do this so that no single archive has any dependency on any other single (or multiple) archive. Appending just lets you make better use of the capacities of high-capacity storage like LTO-4. BTW - BRU PE keeps track of the tape position information, so aside from you deciding which archive you wish to restore from, you don't need to worry about how the data ws written to the tape.

Why would you create a new job and just select the same job,folder select incremental and archive?

I wouldn't. I'd create the Full and Incremental job definitions in the Advanced mode and simply run each as required.

Tim

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Tim,

I'm in the same situation as Jeff is. I like to switch to Bru PE butr I have tons of tapes backuped with Retrospect. I know of the problems running Bru and Retrospect on one machine. Hence I installed Bru PE on a separate internal system disk. Now I have two systems in my old G5.

Does the non-aktive system with Retrospect installed still influence Bru Pe? Should I install Retrospect on a separate firewire system when I need it for restoring and otherwise leave the disk unplugged?

Thanks for your help,

Hans

 

[Tim Jones]

What a great solution!

What a great solution!

Tim,

I'm in the same situation as Jeff is. I like to switch to Bru PE butr I have tons of tapes backuped with Retrospect. I know of the problems running Bru and Retrospect on one machine. Hence I installed Bru PE on a separate internal system disk. Now I have two systems in my old G5.

Now THAT'S one I'd not thought of! I've shared this with our support group as a recommended work-around for moving to BRU from Retrospect.

Does the non-aktive system with Retrospect installed still influence Bru Pe? Should I install Retrospect on a separate firewire system when I need it for restoring and otherwise leave the disk unplugged?

That will work perfectly! No need for a second disk or removal of Retrospect. Thanks - even though your post was a question, you've shared an excellent way to solve this dilemma!

Tim

 

[sublimefilms]

Performance testing results

Performance testing results

Setup:

8coreMacPro - IBM LTO4, ATTO Sas adapter

Source: local 24 drive raid6 - 850MB/sec, large files (2GB-600GB)

Same Hardware/Media:


NovaBackup (Windows/bootcamp) - 2M block size (LTO4 max) = 115 MB/sec

BackupExec (Windows/bootcamp) - 2M block size (LTO4 max) = 110 MB/sec

Bru PE (Mac 10.5.6) - 2M block size (LTO4 max) - 101 MB/Sec

Bru LE (Mac 10.5.6) - 1M block size max (gui overrides/ignores 2M file setting) = 85 MB/sec

BRU Server (Mac 10.5.6) - 2M block size = 60MB/Sec - Not Intel native, poor performance and 40% proc load

Retrospect 8b5 (Mac 10.5.6) - 65k blocksize (guess/not changeable) - 51MB/sec.


Also tested with LSI Sas adapater and HP LTO4, similar results - except LSI sas adapter driver only support 1M blocks under macos so performance is worse.

15% speed increase from the $50 win app over the $500 mac app is hard to dismiss when your dealing with very large data. 200MB/sec over a 10gbe macos samba share is about average, so next test will be to to move the atto card to a junk pc with a 10gbe link and see if throughput remains the same in novabackup.



Regarding Retrospect and BRU on the same system, Retrospect 8beta includes a prefpane to start/stop the engine, if you stop the engine bru seems to work fine so you should have no problem restoring your retrospect archives on the same system.

 

[Tim Jones]

Thanks for providing these numbers. A few notes from the back row -

BRU Server (Mac 10.5.6) - 2M block size = 60MB/Sec - Not Intel native,
poor performance and 40% proc load

BRU Server 1.3 will resolve this. Also, running the current BRU Server on a PowerPC G4 Mac will run faster than your measured values and at a lower load. You can't even run the other products on a G4...

Mentioning proc load here, did you take note of the system load for any of the other products? I'm curious as we've only internally tested older versions of Retrospect.

15% speed increase from the $50 win app over the $500 mac app is hard to dismiss when your dealing with very large data. 200MB/sec over a 10gbe macos samba share is about average, so next test will be to to move the atto card to a junk pc with a 10gbe link and see if throughput remains the same in novabackup.

15% speed increase with $50 app and $249 Windows and a need to reboot your work environment :wink: . Also, Novaback uses a tar-based tape format that can be suspect in restore failures. It also doesn't perform the metadata storage that BRU PE provides, doesn't have the ability to process Mac ACLs or EAs nor protect resource forks (SD2 files anyone?). Novaback is also similar to Retrospect in that the newer versions can't restore tapes written with the older versions. What are your assets worth to you? How about in 10 years? BRU PE will restore tapes written using our 6.1 version from 1988 (that's the oldest tape we currently have).

Regarding Retrospect and BRU on the same system, Retrospect 8beta includes a prefpane to start/stop the engine, if you stop the engine bru seems to work fine so you should have no problem restoring your retrospect archives on the same system.

We've just heard this from another customer. However, he mentioned that it didn't help him as Retrospect 8 will not restore from Retrospect 5 or 6 media...

Tim

 

[sublimefilms]

Processor load, etc

Processor load, etc

Proc Load:

Bru PE and Retro8 beta were low, 5%, very respectable. The two win apps were in the same range.

Bru LE was higher for some reason, 20% or so.


Testing was just for performance, not features. All the apps have their pluses and minuses. In terms of PE, the the session archive is a little scary to me, I prefer to specify files myself. I am curious about testing performance of the dual output option, but cant tie up two lto4s at the moment.

bru vs tar.

After a few more tests I would now guess this is where the performance hit is.
Bru format increases archive size by aprox 13% - 40GB source file = 45.4GB archive
13% more data to write, 15% slower, works out about right? Would you say that is accurate?

I don't mind the extra data size, tape is cheap, but the performance hit is not ideal.
I don't fully understand the benefit of bru vs tar + md5.
In a production environment, you have to make two copies, and you have to verify them, so I'm not sure what the bru format adds to that. If a file is corrupt in the archive, it would be skipped and noted - then we would have to restore is from the 2nd backup (hopefully). How much of the file could be corrupted and still have that extra parity information in the bru archive recover it? Our assets are primarily image sequence - dng, dpx, etc, quicktime files, camera raw file - r3d + phantom dng, and audio - bwf/wav/aiff. Previously we were using backupexec to lto3 from a smb share of the mac, and have not had any resource problems.


For location use I would like to see a BRU LE that does not disable 2MB blocks, simpler is better in the field. For studio use I would much prefer a BRU server update to modern day architecture, although your tech support disagrees with you that PPC vs intel has any impact on performance. Hardware LTO AES encryption support would also be nice. Is there a timeframe for the 1.3 version?