Can’t access Tolis Support – Need to restore tape contents to RAID

[Jim Curtis]

Bob, you crotchety old bastard, I love reading your cantankerous posts. You’re funny, like a clown to amuse us.

I read yesterday that the first LTO drives with native TB3 support are only recently coming to market, and they’re LTO8 (MagStor: $5K). So, SAS, a version of SCSI is still the standard for prior version drives, and people on newer computers w/o PCI need to rely on an external chassis to convert TB to SAS to use anything prior.

You’re right about buying new stuff. That’s a given for people in post production. We’re not averse to that. We’re averse to losing access to our data and media, and our concern is legit. You’re not wrong, but neither are we.

We’ve long ago smelled the coffee and paid to have the D1 tapes we needed transferred. I’m not unwilling to pay another company to make my Tolis tapes and archives readable.

I’m older (and perhaps even more crotchety) than you are at 68 (and a half!). One of my considerations is whether buying new technology will pay dividends before I get a chance to collateralize it.

My thinking is that the smart money is sticking with my LTO5 until it’s time to say “So long, suckers!” There’s nothing wrong with seeking a way to do that. As I wrote previously, I can repurpose an older 2012 MacPro5,1, and run BRU PE 3.x on it, if need be, without buying new stuff. Put in a 10GbE PCI card, and that lessens the pain of connecting to my 2019 MacPro.

Buying new stuff isn’t always the best solution. But, I appreciate your insight, perspective, and your delivery. Don’t stop amusing us.

[James Vorley]

Sadly it looks like they have called it a day. If anyone is stuck with restores let me know and I’ll do my best to help.
https://www.tolisgroup.com

Dear Customers, Partners, and Friends,

It is with extremely heavy hearts that we have been forced to make the painful decision to cease operations at TOLIS Group, Inc., effective August 28, 2020, after more than 20 years of operation.

The current COVID-19 challenges of our world have made it absolutely impossible for our small, Veteran owned business to continue operations any longer.

Please know that TOLIS Group, Inc. tried everything in its power to avoid this situation and used all the resources available to small businesses from the beginning of the COVID related shutdowns, however, it simply wasn’t enough due to the continued shutdowns and project delays of our customers across their primary industries.

At the top of this page are the links to the latest versions of the BRU software packages, ArGest hardware/firmware downloads, and documentation.

ALL of your BRU archives are restorable by these demo versions as the restore functionality NEVER expires.

For those of you with active LTO tape drive warranties, Overland/Tandberg will handle the warranties directly.

For those of you with active Samsung or Seagate warranties, those will be handled by Samsung or Seagate directly.

For those of you with Sonnet Technologies warranties, those will be handled by Sonnet Technologies directly.

We thank you for all your years of patronage, and wish you all well, as we navigate the new normal of the COVID-19 world.

TOLIS Group, Inc.

To send mail correspondence:

TOLIS Group, Inc.

ATTN: Dissolution Correspondence

21630 N 19th Ave, Suite B-13

Phoenix, AZ 85027

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Exactly as Tim Jones wrote (in the post by James Vorley), Bru PE will always be available and free for reading LTO tapes created by it. So, if you download the latest version and store it safely, as long as you have a compatible Mac with a compatible SAS card and SAS LTO drive, you can read Bru LTO tapes. Even if you have a Bru PE license, it doesn’t need Tolis to be functional to use the license, as far as I can tell.

I’ve been using Bru tapes since 2010 and have backed up client data of Petabytes over thousands of tapes, using Bru. If a client were to walk in with a Bru tape, even if I don’t have a catalog of it, I can read the tape and import that into any Bru installation. Of course, I have kept catalogs of every tape I’ve written.

But with Apple Silicon Macs and Big Sur on the horizon, its only a matter of time before SAS cards and tape drivers get unsupported rendering the current LTO drives unusable. The current Macs we have, will last another 5 years or so. Even the one we just purchase now, will probably not run beyond another 10 years tops. So, we have that much time to migrate all our Bru tapes to LTFS and hope that lasts.

Even with LTFS, LTO-5, LTO-6 tapes written using LTFS in, say 2015, are no longer readable in current LTO-8 drives. So one needs to maintain LTO-6 and LTO-7 drives for as long as the data on LTFS LTO-5/6 tapes is valuable. And while those are still serviceable, one needs to migrate all the LTO-5/6 drives to LTO-8, LTO-9 or LTO-10 depending on the current version available when one decides to migrate.

Far more worrying is what happens with defunct software like Windows NTBackup. Back in 2004-2008, a post house I used to work with (which shut down in 2013 or so) backed up all client data to LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes using Windows NTBackup. It was an IT dept decision based on the fact that Microsoft will be around forever. Well, they still are around, but they’ve deprecated the software as well as tape support in their OS.

There is no way I could find, to read those tapes, due to a maze of incompatibilities between Windows, SAS cards, and LTO drives. And, the client/s couldn’t make up their minds on how much they would be willing to spend to migrate their assets from Win NTBackup to LTFS. So, I’ve given up on the migration. And all this data is dead. Exactly like the DigiBeta archives from Smoke/Flame systems that clients made for their video finishing projects. Or like Quantel archives on MO disks.

BTW, before anyone does a Google search and finds the page on Microsoft that lets you download Win NTBackup for Win 10, please be informed that that is for disk based NTBackup backups. Those are supported. But tape based Win NTbackups are not.

And so it goes. LTO backup *may* last for 30 years, but the infrastructure needed to read those tapes is looking like it almost certainly will not last as long as the tapes will.

[Jim Curtis]

Neil, you wrote:

“If a client were to walk in with a Bru tape, even if I don’t have a
catalog of it, I can read the tape and import that into any Bru
installation. Of course, I have kept catalogs of every tape I’ve
written.”

Is this because you’re still using BRU PE 3.x?

This is the issue I had that caused me to write the original post. The most current Tape Import Tool looks like it’s importing the tape, but when I open Argest Backup, the tape name is on the Archive list, but it shows no contents. James Vorley helped me copy the entire tape to my RAID, but there’s no method to get at individual files or folders within ArGest.

If you’ve discovered a method to get tape contents into an ArGest 4.x Archive database, I’d be grateful if you could share it.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Yes, that’s with Bru 3.x. I didn’t upgrade to Argest, and probably was a good thing I didn’t, looking at the trouble you’re having with importing archives.

Very recently, like in May-June sometime, whilst still in lockdown, a client needed to restore some data from a tape written a couple of years ago. I knew they had kept catalogs safely, but , with all the social distancing in place, I didn’t have easy access to them.

So I went ahead and imported the catalog off the tape. It took a while, but I don’t know how long exactly as I kept it for import and checked it the next morning. So maybe it got done in a few minutes or maybe longer.

Anyway, with the catalog inside Bru, I proceeded to extract the files I needed.

So, yes, even with the shutting down of Tolis, Bru 3.x archives aren’t orphaned, it would appear. At least till we still have the tape drives, and systems to read them.

Now, if someone can convince Tim Jones to frequent this forum, and offer ‘per case’ support on Bru, for a small fee, maybe with Patreon, or some such online payment scheme, it would help the large number of existing Bru and Argest users while keeping him supported.

[Jim Curtis]

It may be Tim who has COVID. I hope not, but I got the impression dealing with support that Tolis is three people.

I upgraded to ArGest shortly after buying my 2019 MacPro that forced me to use Catalina. The first several builds were buggy, and I traded quite a bit of correspondence between a Kayleigh and some with a Marcos, who I inferred was the programmer writing the code, and Tim Jones. Perhaps Marcos is a person who could pick up the ball, and run with it.

One of my first issues was with importing my BRU PE 3.x catalogs into 4.x. There were several archives missing, and some of the data was jumbled in others. This is why a tape I’d made in 2018 disappeared from my Archive database, and led to this thread.

I still have DMGs of BRU PE 3.x. I suppose I could back up my catalogs, try an older version of the Tape Import Tool, and see what happens. But, I’m lucky to be hammered with paying work now, and won’t have time to give it a try for a while.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Bru PE 3.x is not compatible with macOS Catalina. So, its already impossible to buy a new Mac that can run Bru PE 3.x reliably.

I haven’t used ArGest, but from what I’ve gathered from your post, it seems to have one large database of catalogs. Unlike Bru PE 3.x and earlier, which had one catalog per tape. Which one could simply copy to a new system and Bru on that system would see that catalog and enable you to restore from that tape.

Another method I use extensively when making backups fro disk to LTO is to also drag and drop the contents into a Diskcatalogmaker catalog. And name it the same as the LTO. This enables me to ‘browse’ the LTO contents offline without having to actually run the tape or open Bru.

Alternately, at one client place, I have NeoFinder which can actually import Bru Catalogs and present them in a Finder like interface so that too enables you to ‘browse’ a Bru tape offline. Mind that for some reason NeoFinder can read file and folder names and reconstruct the folder structure on a Bru Tape, but it seems unable to show file creation/modification time. Maybe it s NeoFinder 6.x thing fixed in the newer version.

But if you restore from a Bru tape, all file date/time are, of course, restored. So Bru certainly stores this somewhere.

[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Jim,

Just to clarify one thing… all LTO drives have a SAS or Fibre Channel interface. What I think you saw is an all in one solution. MagStor, mLogic, NetStor, OWC and others make units that convert Thunderbolt to SAS for an internal LTO drive. This simplifies connection to a Mac. Some also have an external SAS port so you can connect an older generation drive. Handy if you want to migrate from LTO-5 to LTO-8 for example.

Best,

Martin

CTO

YoYotta.com

[Tim Jones]

First – I’m happy to announce that BRU and the various TOLIS solutions are not dead. I also apologize for going dark for these 2 months, but we were working on a new opportunity that will make everyone happy. Please stand by for more info in an announcement this week.

To Bob Z – careful, friend, doxing is a felony, and what you were promoting above about our phone numbers is doxing.

To Jim – I know that Marcos and Eric provided these steps to you previously in support, but here they are again for posterity:

Each BRU Archive is written with a buffer size that you select when you start using the product. In order to restore data from a tapeset, you need to use that same buffer size. This is what you were running into above, and here are the steps for sorting things completely from a Terminal session:

[code]

# Rewind and get the buffer size of the tape:
tapectl rewind
tapectl header | bru -gf –

# that will return the header for the tape in the drive. In it
# look for the bufsize: line. That is your buffer size to use for
# the restore. For example, if your line read:
# bufsize: 132078
# you would pass that number (or divide by 1024) to the -b argument:

tapectl rewind
bru -tvvvvf ntape0 -b 132078

# This will resolve the read error on first block.

# To restore to a mounted array, cd into the restore location and then
# pass the -PA argument to the restore line to tell BRU to restore in
# non-absolute path mode:

tapectl rewind
cd /Volumes/MyArrray/MyRestoreFolder
bru -xvvvvf ntape0 -b 132078 -PA

# You will see the data filenames displayed as they are resstored to your
# mounted array.

[/code]

To Everyone – hang in there and we’ll be back up to speed very soon.

Tim

[Jim Curtis]

Tim, I’m glad to learn you and Tolis are not dead yet. Welcome back.

I have copied this info and saved it, in case I need it later on.

Just this weekend, I set up a 2012 MacPro5,1 running High Sierra as an archive station, running Bru PE 3.2.6, which has been solid for me. That seemed like the best option for me for the near term, as I mull over transitioning to something new.

It’s worth noting that the archive and verify process is noticeably faster on this older system than it is on my shiny new MacPro, Catalina, and ArGest 4.x. I’d mentioned on an earlier support ticket for ArGest that it seemed to be taking longer than I was expecting.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you have in store for us that will make us happy.