Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • 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 :)

Problems with Quantum LTO4 & Retrospect 6.1 on OS X

We started with Bru just doing back ups. Then with the helps of a company called DAX, they wrote a plug in for catDV, caDv provides asset management and integrates perfectly with FCP and Qt workflow. So now all we need to to is from with in catDV is send relevant media to LTO or ask for the media to be restored. Its very easy.

cat DV is also able to read a sequence from FCP and request the master media ie R3D's, be restored, so is a conform is possible. Its also possible to automate the whole process.

Mail me if youd like to know more. I have no commercial interest in any of the products.

Dave
UK
 
OK... I've just skimmed this thread so far, so may be repeating some things:

LTO-4HH kit from Quantum is a good bundle. However, I have some questions / comments for the original poster to start with.

britim, you say you're using the LSI SAS 3801E. Where did you get this controller? AFAIK, Quantum is not including this specific model with the drives and it's actually not on the list of supported controllers for OSX and Atempo / EMC/Rretrospect. If you bought the Quantum kit that includes a controller, you should have received the LSI SAS 3442E.

I will agree with Offhollywood that the Retrospect software is garbage. But I'm going to disagree with him over the LTO-3A. I've demoed one for a couple weeks just after NAB this year, played with one here and there since. They're terribly slow, my clients and I both hate them because there's no cross-compatibility with standard LTO formats, the embedded software isn't very good at all and the embedded FTP server does not work with many common FTP client softwares and does not support many commonly used FTP commands. The client perspective is really a non-issue for our internal backups, but being someone who is long familiar with LTO and other tape formats, I just can't get myself to travel down the A-series route.

ATempo is much better software than Retrospect, but also more expensive and has a lot of shortcomings as well. The upcoming version of Retrospect is a lot better than 6.x and should be available soon. I signed up for the beta program a while back when it was open (don't know if it still is) and it is a lot better. However, I'm not trusting any real backups to it yet.

On OSX there just are not a lot of sofware options and many options are specific to tape hardware and HBA combinations. Apple does not provide or maintain any OSX profiles or drivers for tape systems. They leave it entirely to third parties to do so. None of the tape manufacturers out there are providing OS level drivers on the Mac for tape systems. Software vendors are left writing specific control or driver software into their tape software. It gets really annoying and can become quite difficult to choose the right software for your needs that also works with your desired tape drive and HBA combo.

Tolis Group makes good software and their upcoming BRU Producers Edition is aimed at the music and film industries and is in beta now. I'm going to assume that it will work with the LTO-4HH kit as this is a very popular LTO kit right now and a lot of Mac people are picking them up.

This desktop LTO-4 kit, when installed on OSX, is a good solution and priced very well compared to LTO-3A for small shops and owner/operator types. But for those with massive amounts to back up or bigger operations, I would recommend something that runs on Windows Server or Linux as opposed to an OSX solution, even using the same kit -- just put it on a system / OS that will provide more complete and robust support for archiving your data. Data archival on the Mac just downright sucks.

I use both Retrospect and ATempo software with OSX and my LTO-4 system. I'm planning to buy a second LTO-4HH kit for another workstation in the next few weeks, but I was hoping that some of the currently beta softwares would come to market before I buy another ATempo license.

flameop said:
Get a 1' dude.
Click to expand...

Wha? No. That's not an issue here. Unless the cable itself is faulty, and I highly doubt, the length is not an issue. SAS spec allows for lengths up to 3 meters, IIRC. I have a 2m cable on my LTO-4HH unit and it works just fine. I had to go a bit longer than the 1m cable that was included.
 
The cable length may not be an issue I agree.. it was just suggested to me when trying to sort ours out that 3 maybe to long sometimes.

HBA were using is LSI 3801E and have no issues.. have backed up 2TB up with no issues in one ArchiveSet with Retrospect.

As far as I can tell is the 3801 has 2 external ports.. but the 2442 has 1 but has Raid ability which is overkill for a LTO unless you adding raids onto the same HBA.

We run a separate HBA for the servers raid.

http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/pro...ers/sas_hbas/advanced_connectivity/index.html

si
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
OK... I've just skimmed this thread so far, so may be repeating some things:

LTO-4HH kit from Quantum is a good bundle. However, I have some questions / comments for the original poster to start with.

britim, you say you're using the LSI SAS 3801E. Where did you get this controller? AFAIK, Quantum is not including this specific model with the drives and it's actually not on the list of supported controllers for OSX and Atempo / EMC/Rretrospect. If you bought the Quantum kit that includes a controller, you should have received the LSI SAS 3442E.

I will agree with Offhollywood that the Retrospect software is garbage. But I'm going to disagree with him over the LTO-3A. I've demoed one for a couple weeks just after NAB this year, played with one here and there since. They're terribly slow, my clients and I both hate them because there's no cross-compatibility with standard LTO formats, the embedded software isn't very good at all and the embedded FTP server does not work with many common FTP client softwares and does not support many commonly used FTP commands. The client perspective is really a non-issue for our internal backups, but being someone who is long familiar with LTO and other tape formats, I just can't get myself to travel down the A-series route.

ATempo is much better software than Retrospect, but also more expensive and has a lot of shortcomings as well. The upcoming version of Retrospect is a lot better than 6.x and should be available soon. I signed up for the beta program a while back when it was open (don't know if it still is) and it is a lot better. However, I'm not trusting any real backups to it yet.

On OSX there just are not a lot of sofware options and many options are specific to tape hardware and HBA combinations. Apple does not provide or maintain any OSX profiles or drivers for tape systems. They leave it entirely to third parties to do so. None of the tape manufacturers out there are providing OS level drivers on the Mac for tape systems. Software vendors are left writing specific control or driver software into their tape software. It gets really annoying and can become quite difficult to choose the right software for your needs that also works with your desired tape drive and HBA combo.

Tolis Group makes good software and their upcoming BRU Producers Edition is aimed at the music and film industries and is in beta now. I'm going to assume that it will work with the LTO-4HH kit as this is a very popular LTO kit right now and a lot of Mac people are picking them up.

This desktop LTO-4 kit, when installed on OSX, is a good solution and priced very well compared to LTO-3A for small shops and owner/operator types. But for those with massive amounts to back up or bigger operations, I would recommend something that runs on Windows Server or Linux as opposed to an OSX solution, even using the same kit -- just put it on a system / OS that will provide more complete and robust support for archiving your data. Data archival on the Mac just downright sucks.

I use both Retrospect and ATempo software with OSX and my LTO-4 system. I'm planning to buy a second LTO-4HH kit for another workstation in the next few weeks, but I was hoping that some of the currently beta softwares would come to market before I buy another ATempo license.



Wha? No. That's not an issue here. Unless the cable itself is faulty, and I highly doubt, the length is not an issue. SAS spec allows for lengths up to 3 meters, IIRC. I have a 2m cable on my LTO-4HH unit and it works just fine. I had to go a bit longer than the 1m cable that was included.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that post Jeff. I knew your insight would help clear the confusion.

I did not purchase the LSI card in the bundle. It was added as part of a Mac Pro setup I bought along with the drive, video cards etc from Tekserve in NYC.

I was originally set to get the Atto card but the Tekserve gurus caught that and replaced it with the LSI.

The drive is recognized on the system and the layoff to tape works well.
The problems occur during verify, and restoring the data.

I have no complaints with the Quantum drive itself. It really seems like a nice drive and Quantum's support, though PC centric, has been helpful.

I have read of few people having this problem in general with Retrospect in there forums and wonder if the program might be the cause.

On Monday I plan to do some calling around to get to the bottem of this.

I have several Terrabytes of drives full of projects that need to be backed up and that's not including the RED footage.

I really need a working solution now and am not too keen on waiting.

I appreciate everyone's input.

Brian
 
For a Quick Update.

I just got an email from my rep at Tekserve concerning this issue.
He states that the Retrospect techs recommend the LSI 3442e card as the one to use with the Quantum LTO4 SAS drive. Sounds like Jeff Kilgroe may have had a point.

I should be receiving the new card soon.

I'll followup shortly.

Brian
 
I spent weeks trying to get the Quantum Lto-4 HH to work on my macpro, but finally gave up and returned it for an HP drive (as advised by Tolis Group Tech support). I could never get the Quantum to reliably restore anything.

So far the HP is working well, but there's still been a few little bugs.
I'm using the HP 1760 hooked up to an Atto H380 SAS card with BRU LE.

The HP/Atto also seems to be a little faster...about 89 mb/s backup and restore speeds according to BRU.

Anyway, I'm still doing testing, but so far the Hp/Atto combo seems to be a winner. And the simple BRU LE interface is great...very intuitive (you can drag and drop files).

I should also point out that the BRU LE tech support guys have been AWESOME! Very responsive...

Jason
 
Thanks for this info Jason.

If this HBA card swap fails to work, I plan to go the HP route too.

What were some of the bugs you experienced with the HP LTO and BRU?

Were the restore problems you experienced with the Quantum the same "hang" issues I described in the 1st post of this thread?

Brian
 
Well, some of the issues were operator errors (me)...based on the fact that I don't have a strong traditional IT background. Frankly, I could have really used an "LTO for Dummies" book when I started this process. I think the last tape backup I played with was DAT tape back in '97. :tongue:

BRU LE does have a bug on restore where you have to select the first file in an archive instead of just the archive itself...tech support was able to reproduce it and said it was going to be fixed.

That problem screwed me up for awhile, so I'm probably thinking there are more issues than there really are. And again, I think a lot of my issues or confusion is just learning how LTO tape archiving really works...as in, it's not a hard drive!

Anyway, you should give the BRU LE demo a try...it is much easier to use compared to retrospect. After fighting the Quantum for so long, I won't say I'm 100% confident in LTO backup yet, but I'm getting there...

Jason
 
New ball game for me too though extremely critical for a
camera like the RED.

Perhaps there should be a new thread or sticky created with a collection
of OS/HBA/DRIVE/Backup software combinations that REDusers have had success with.

There's knowledge out there on this stuff but it's not well chronicled in one place.

Brian
 
We use NetVault with our LTO-4 OSX setup. It was a little tricky to get full speed out of it, but it works fine now and NetVault do have good support.
 
Britim,

To answer your last question, yes...the Quantum drive would hang while both backing up to tape and restoring.

Jason
 
I'm guessing Brian's issues are the controller card. Hopefully the new 3442E card fixes it for him.

I also have some good news to report here. I have successfully written two LTO-4 tapes with BRU LE under OSX. I will begin testing the recovery of that data here shortly. I have only found one little quirk and that is I must check the "overwrite existing data" when using a blank tape, otherwise it gives me an error that it can't seek to the end of the data. To me, that seems like a bug with BRU, don't know if it's a known bug or not, I'm sure it is.

If the recovery operations work out, I will probably be dumping Retrospect all together, unless Retrospect X is a hell of a lot better when released. The speed alone with BRU is worth it over Retrospect.
 
OMFG!!! I had a hard drive crash today! Lost a 1TB HDD in a 3-drive internal RAID-0. Bay #4 in my Mac Pro that has the LTO-4 on it. So BRU is getting put to the test here in just a few minutes. I have a current backup with Retrospect that I did sunday night. But the only backup I have of what I've done over the last 2.5 days is on the tapes I've made today with BRU. A few hours ago, I sat down at this system to start testing the recovery of data through BRU and was greeted by notifications from the RAID utility.

Damn, this is surreal.... After a couple hours, I gave up trying to recover the drive and RAID volume. The drive will spin up, but it grinds, it's toast. I replaced it with another and will be restoring from the BRU tapes shortly. Unfreakingbelievable.

Oh yeah, this is still with the Quantum SAS kit -- LTO-4HH table top drive with LSI 3442E PCI-E SAS HBA. BRU LE 30-day trial edition. The RAID volume is alive again, I'll report back once I have a verdict on restoration.
 
Very sorry to read about your troubles.

At least your data is archived.
This is why I hate being without a backup solution.

I really hope things work out with BRU tools.
I've been giving it a really close look since the beginning of this thread.

Good luck.

Brian
 
I had Retrospect hanging on Writing and restoring on OSX with an LTO-4, I installed windows on that computer instead and have used Norton flawlessly for 5 Tapes backing up a feature Film Day every night.
 
I have had Retrospect running for the last 4 years with LTO 2 then 3 and now 4. I Have back up over 218 tapes and never once had and issue. Have run the drives from several computers over the years but have always stuck with scsi.

Cheers, Chris
 
Well... I restored everything off of the first BRU tape just fine. The second tape verified OK when making it, and seemed to restore fine, but after two separate restore attempts, half the data is corrupt and it's all data from the RAID volume that went down.

At this point, I think BRU needs a bit more testing to know for sure what's going on. However, I'm of the opinion that the backup is corrupt because the drive had already failed, just not catastrophically at the point of making the backup.

I will do some more testing this weekend.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top