bru tape import tool and bru pe

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Are you sure the Bru-PE version is 18.1.1? As far as I remember the last version was 3.x

In general, Bru-PE could import archives from older versions, but not from newer ones. Maybe the tape is from an Argest setup? Arrest is the successor of Bru-PE.

[Juan Ignacio cabrera]

Late reply, but for anyone landing here from search: this exact symptom, a tape that verifies clean while the Import Tool reports No Archive Catalog Found, does not mean your data is gone. The catalog BRU wrote to the tape itself is usually still intact and the archives are readable even when the desktop software cannot rebuild its own database from them.

One thing worth doing right now, whatever path you take: stop re-running the import against that tape. Every load and every read pass on an aged tape is wear, and if this is your only copy you want its next full read to be the one that actually gets the data off. Write down the exact error text and the tape generation, then decide.

We hit this wall at our own facility. Our vault was written with BRU PE. When the software died we built a recovery pipeline on modern hardware, migrated our own library, and validated every file against the tape’s own records. We now run it as a service for other people holding BRU tapes: survey first (you get the complete catalog of what is on the tape before committing to anything), then a verified restore with a per-file validation report.

If anybody might be interested, we just became live! Details and published pricing at lightbenders.com/bru-restore. Happy to answer questions here either way, including if you just want to compare notes on doing it yourself.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

That’s a great initiative Juan. I visited your site and went through the details.

I do But PE tape migration for clients in India. Of course, I haven’t built a software for it. I simply have a couple of old Macs still running only for Bru and the occasional FCP 7 project conversion.

We also come across tapes written in old proprietary software like Windows NTBackup, Retrospect, Veritas, Norton something. Earlier we thought we could maintain an old PC for this but we didn’t get many interested clients. They preferred to let their data die rather than spend money migrating it.

[Juan Ignacio cabrera]

Thanks Neil, appreciate you taking the time to look through the site. Please let me know your honest thoughts!

Keeping a couple of old Macs alive is exactly how everyone has survived this, and for healthy tapes with intact catalogs it still works. What finally pushed us to build our own path were the other cases: catalogs dead or missing, ArGest refusing tapes it should read, and the old machine reaching end-of-life. If one of those scenarios ever lands on your bench and the old Macs say no, happy to compare notes.

And your point about clients preferring to let data die rather than pay for migration is painfully familiar. Part of why we publish pricing openly is so people can see the decision is smaller than they fear, before the tapes age past the point of deciding. The big recovery labs are priced for physically damaged media, which is overkill when the tape is healthy and only the software is dead. So I wanted this to be reasonable and affordable, from post-house to post-house.