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LTO tape drives for MacPro?

A

Alexis Hanawalt

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What are the best options out there for LTO-3 drives for backing up 4K data with a MacPro? This seems like the best option for projects that have a lot of footage (I'd thought about Blu-Ray, but that just seems too risky...) - But I can find any vendors that specify any sort of functionality with Macs.
 
Most all LTO-3, etc... tape systems support Mac. You will need to equip your Mac Pro with a proper SCSI controller and then buy the drive system of choice. Some configurations come with backup software, some don't, but there's plenty out there for the Mac too.

I'm holding off until my RED is closer -- hopes that LTO-4 or other possible backup solutions emerge by then. BluRay I don't think will be a real possibility until they get capacities up, prices down and prove its reliability.
 
Back up drives

Back up drives

Not LTO, but Quantum's SDLT 600A is a roughly equivalent Mac OSX compatible product that connects to your computer network via GigaBit Ethernet. I have seen it working wth a MacBook Pro as well as tower style Macs.

www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/DLT/SDLT600A/Index.aspx

Although this site talks a lot about MXF, it works with any type of file....
 
LTO-4 products are supposed to be out in the first half of this year. 800 GB per tape, over 100 MB/s transfer rate. Not too shabby. Probably going to be pretty pricey at first, though.
 
Chris Kenny said:
LTO-4 products are supposed to be out in the first half of this year. 800 GB per tape, over 100 MB/s transfer rate. Not too shabby. Probably going to be pretty pricey at first, though.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I figure LTO-3 will still be the way to go price-wise for a while. Psychologically a little easier to deal with the concept of 400Gb on a tape than 800Gb too...
 
Cinewalt said:
Yeah, I figure LTO-3 will still be the way to go price-wise for a while. Psychologically a little easier to deal with the concept of 400Gb on a tape than 800Gb too...
Click to expand...

Heh. It's hard to deal with any of it. I've got an IT background (this time last year I was making most of my money doing network administration and web development), and I can barely wrap my head around what's happened with storage capacities in the last few years. I'll be in the middle of crunching numbers to figure out what kind of disk array to build, and I'll look up and realize I'm just casually considering how many thousands of gigabytes of storage I'll need, and that six months from now, I'm going to have over 10,000 times as much storage as on my first Mac, a Quadra 660AV.

It's sort of strange to be able to tell "back in the day" stories when you're 24, but that's the situation the pace of technology has put me in.

And then I think of how nuts things are going to be 10 years from now....
 
Chris Kenny said:
Heh. It's hard to deal with any of it. I've got an IT background (this time last year I was making most of my money doing network administration and web development), and I can barely wrap my head around what's happened with storage capacities in the last few years. I'll be in the middle of crunching numbers to figure out what kind of disk array to build, and I'll look up and realize I'm just casually considering how many thousands of gigabytes of storage I'll need, and that six months from now, I'm going to have over 10,000 times as much storage as on my first Mac, a Quadra 660AV.

It's sort of strange to be able to tell "back in the day" stories when you're 24, but that's the situation the pace of technology has put me in.

And then I think of how nuts things are going to be 10 years from now....
Click to expand...

I hear ya man. Nothing like growing up and seeing all of the major technological advancements happen right before your eyes. Pretty amazing if you ask me!

I'm not as familiar with tape drive technology so maybe someone who is could shed some light. Is the LTO-3 different than Sony AIT drives? And what should one look into for a tape drive? I agree the bluray really isn't the best optimal archiving format and for me as of now, the tape drive seems like the best solution so far.
 
wow.. did i just stumble upon a chinese thread? cuz i cant understand anything you guys are talking about.. i know how to light a scene.. use lenses.. shoot.. move camera.. but wtf.... am i completely screwed?
 
If it helps, we use an Exabyte LTO-3 autoloader with an Atto SCSI card and Retrospect. It's not running on a MacPro, but my suggestion (depending on how much footage you plan to be dealing with) is to buy a used G5 and a single SCSI card. We have a system here that pretty much spends all day backing up or reloading footage (4 hour+ per tape backup).

We've had the unit for 6-8 Months (might be longer not really sure, I'd have to find the bill) and our own productions have used 40+ tapes holding about 14 TB of raw footage. That doesn't include the 25+ tapes that have left the office on client projects (productions we only post).

Also, I highly recommend an autoloader. An IT friend of mine recommended it and I had a hard time biting the bullet on the extra cost at the time, but it's been completely worth every penny.

Data is a pain to deal with.
 
tim@frameblender said:
Data is a pain to deal with.
Click to expand...

Yeah, anyone who doesn't have decent tech skills themselves should definitely hook up with someone who does, assuming they plan to keep copies of large amounts of footage. What you don't want to do is try to scale up the "data management" practices I see at small video production shops all the time, which basically consist of having a lot of external FireWire drives kicking around with no kind of centralized infrastructure or planning.

I've been posting a bunch about these issues on my blog (see sig).
 
Im tempted to just run hard-drives and back them up for the first 1-1 1/2 years. with the data storage sector changing so fast in size, format and cost I have a feeling it may be something to sit back and watch. I also mainly plan to shoot commercials and musicvids with my red so my footage amount will be a little less then others.
 
Chris Kenny said:
What you don't want to do is try to scale up the "data management" practices I see at small video production shops all the time, which basically consist of having a lot of external FireWire drives kicking around with no kind of centralized infrastructure or planning.
Click to expand...

You just described exactly where I'm coming from... just finishing editing a feature documentary with 600 hours of HDV footage spanning about 6 Lacie 500's, 6 G-RAID 500's and one 2Tb G-RAID Pro (bought in that order - so things have been getting better...) It's all daisy-chained FW800 into one mac which is just direct-networked to a 2nd editing station with Gigabit Ethernet. The calculated risk is that if a drive goes down, it's a week's worth of re-digitizing. Basically, it's all a result of producers in complete denial about the fact that footage requires storage.

But that all changes when there's nothing to redigitize...
 
My intended workflow is to back up to Firewire drives during shooting, then copy to my 1.6TB RAID-5 array on the editing machine, and keep the Firewire drives around during the course of the edit as a 'near-line' backup, hooked up to my old G4 which will be backing them up to LTO for long term storage.

I've asked my re-seller for a quote for an LTO-3 system, and am hoping that the arrival of LTO-4 will make the prices for LTO-3 drop. 400GB is actually quite a convenient size, as it would allow backup of one 320GB RED-DRIVE and (by my quick rough calculations) leave space for a DVCProHD copy of the footage which would be quicker to restore and possibly easier to offline with at a future time. My calculations may be off, and we don't know the exact capacity of a RED-DRIVE in terms of time, but worst case there would certainly be room for a DV copy of the rushes, and that would be universally useful.
 
lordnumberzero said:
I like the gigabit ethernet part a lot.
Click to expand...

Me too. I didn't know they had that.... What would really be handy is if they had GbitE connections on some of their larger autoloader units. This could be a good option for small operations with mixed environments or just those who don't need anything big and don't want to mess with SCSI issues.
 
D2dt

D2dt

tim@frameblender said:
If it helps, we use an Exabyte LTO-3 autoloader with an Atto SCSI card and Retrospect. It's not running on a MacPro, but my suggestion (depending on how much footage you plan to be dealing with) is to buy a used G5 and a single SCSI card. We have a system here that pretty much spends all day backing up or reloading footage (4 hour+ per tape backup).

We've had the unit for 6-8 Months (might be longer not really sure, I'd have to find the bill) and our own productions have used 40+ tapes holding about 14 TB of raw footage. That doesn't include the 25+ tapes that have left the office on client projects (productions we only post).

Also, I highly recommend an autoloader. An IT friend of mine recommended it and I had a hard time biting the bullet on the extra cost at the time, but it's been completely worth every penny.

Data is a pain to deal with.
Click to expand...

We've opted for a similar strategy in preparation for the rather large storage requirements of featurefilm in 4K: We've setup a Disk to Disk to Tape backup system - comprising some 8 terrabytes of Raid 60 work disks - the same amount for mirroring the workdisks - and an IBM TS3100 LTO3 autoloader, handling 22 300 GB tapes.

The proces of mirroring from disk to disk works like a charm in the background.
But when we're done with a project, we first transfer the content of the mirror to the tapelibrary - then we erase the mirror and do a restore from tape to the mirror. We then compare the restore to the workdisks and if things are the same, we delete material from the workdisks and make a second tape backup to be stored in another physical location.
It's a bit cumbersome but gives you a nice warm feeling to know things are safe.

Steen Dongo
---------------
PICTUREWISE FILM & TV
 
IMGentertainment said:
So I looked at quantum's site and the only thing that worrys me is they only have windows based drivers? anyone have a link for an LTO 3 drive with mac drivers. and card sugestions?
Click to expand...

Retrospect works with LTO 3 and Macintosh; SCSI shoiuld be one of the faster (320) ones. I'm now in Italy and don't remember which card I used, but I think all the faster ones should be fine.

BTW when you buy Retrospect buy also the service agreement. The program is a litle be strange in handling, but works very fine.
Have all a nice weekend
Istvan
 
All these tape drives from Quantum, Exabyte, etc.. are standard SCSI-3 tape systems and will work with any system without specific drivers. You just need proper backup software. Buying a retail box version of one of these tape systems often gets you Windows backup software (sometimes Mac). However, as others have suggested, look into backup software and choose which software you would like to use to fit your workflow and then choose one of the tape systems. I think you'll find that most tape systems are supported with most decent software. Also don't just assume you're going to connect one of these tape systems directly to a Mac Pro workstation. You may find you're better served by a dedicated backup staging system that runs Windows or Linux and the tape drive interfaces to that.
 
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