DLT Tape Archiving for Sony XDCam EX Footage

[Jerry Hofmann]

How much footage do you need to back up, and for how long?

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann

Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.

[Michael Sacci]

DLT is slow and expensive per GB, get a LTO drive. LTO 4 is very usable for backing up camera raw footage.

[Greg Ondera]

I have 24 G-tech drives fat with footage on them presently. I keep buying drives and will soon get a drive array tower as well. My thinking says that as long as I have a footage backup, using mirrored drives is not really necessary. If a drive crashes, all you need is the FCP file and the footage. What do you think?

LTO sounds good and it is also less expensive it seems. Do you know what the shelf life of an LTO tape is?

Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org

[Jerry Hofmann]

Drives die more often than LTO tapes go bad I’d think. In the long run, it’s less expensive to back up on LTO tapes (the manufacturers say they’ll live 50 years I think). They are likely the best solution at the moment, but I’m afraid nothing is fool proof.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann

Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.

[Greg Ondera]

So you have me looking at Quantum’s removable LTO-4 HH for $1,600 on Google products. I notice the tapes are about $23.65 for a 400/800 gig tape, which is an excellent price, but what is the “400/800” half-gig amount number all about? Does it produce a better recording if it records in 400 gig mode or what does that number split represent?

And what is the difference between LTO-3 and LTO-4? Or LTO-5 for that matter? Thanks!

Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org

[Greg Ondera]

Thanks, Jerry. That’s my thinking as well. 50 years of archiving may have my great grandchildren scratching their heads as to why the tapes don’t work after that expanse of time, but for me, I like that and those tapes will live long after I am gone.

Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org

[John Christie]

I’ve been doing the same research recently. Have a look at the Cache-A, an LTO device attached to a small linux box with a couple of internal drives. It’s the only stand alone solution that requires no other software to run.

It can read cards directly which makes it easy to copy them first to the Cache A and then to your FCP systems.

It’s not as fast as a NAS or Fibre attached drive, which can be a factor when restoring across a network at Gigabit speeds only.

Beyond that, if you get a stand alone LTO drive you need to consider which backup software to use and that gets tricky. There’s Retrospect, cheap but not very expandable or net savvy. Or you can go with Atempo at the high end – over $25K for the software alone, but it integrates through Final Cut Server for very robust backups. You can even backup an entire project directly through Final Cut.

LTO 5 is the way to go, 1.5 TB per tape. The 2 sizes quoted are for compressed and uncompressed. But as video is already compressed, just look at the smaller number.

Cheers

John Christie

[Jerry Hofmann]

I’ve seen this unit! It’s really the cat’s meow for archive at an affordable price.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann

Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.

[Greg Ondera]

Thanks for all of this info. Cache-A is selling for about $9,500.00 and it looks versatile for an editing house that runs a lot of projects through and client deadlines might be an issue. However I only need a simple backup in case my drives go down.

Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org

[Jeremy Garchow]

We have a ProCache and have had great success. It has really become the central backbone of all of our data.

We started with the Prime Cache and moved to the ProCache. Cost of entry is a bit high, but it’s worth it. One nice part of the LTO spec is that redundancy is built right in to it. Every LTO drive has to be able to read two versions before it. So LTO4 can read LTO2.

The real ironic thing about it is we are now going back to tape! But we can now put absolutely everything on tape, including project files and all related files.

You’re going to want at least lto4 if not lto5. Lto5 will have more capacity and will generally be more fast in archives and restores. We find our LTO4 runs at about fw800 speed or a little faster.

Hth,

Jeremy