-
DLT Tape Archiving for Sony XDCam EX Footage
-
400/800GB is uncompressed/compressed on the tapes. I would use use uncompressed but that is what I have always done so others may weight in on it.
While the expensive systems are worth the money especially for busy studios you can get by just fine with just the drive which is a fraction of the cost. You have to maintain records and do more stuff by hand but for a small shop saving several grand is really important.
-
I hear you Michael. We are small and purchases are made extremely carefully.
What I like about Cache-A is that no other software needed. Everything runs from a web browser. You plug in the Cache-A, hook to your network, choose how to send the data to the unit and off you go. Also, the cacheA keeps a searchable database of every tape that’s been made in the machine, so it can double as a simple catalog as well which can be accessed on the network from any computer. It’s quite handy. Also, Cache-A has been adding more and more features as it matures.
Once some fo our sata drives starting failing, it was time to step up to a more permanent solution.
-
Jeremy: I’m about to purchase one of these units and I have a couple really rudimentary questions about workflow with the Cache-A.
I would like to archive raw camera dailies as they come to us each day, say from a RED shoot, after they’ve been loaded for the editing app.
Would I simply attach the dailies drive to the Cache-A (or go through the network) and tell it “copy these files to tape now”, or would I copy the files to the internal HD of device and have it write to tape once I’ve got all the dailies for a given job or have enough gathered to fill one LTO tape?
And if I copy to tape directly, can I then add the next day’s work to the tape to the same tape, until the tape is full? In other words, do I have to dump to a tape all at once, or can I keep adding files over time as the software keeping track of what’s added to the tape?
Any practical workflow advice from your experience would be really helpful. I’m brand new to LTO tech, as I guess you can tell.
Thanks
Michael Heldman
-
Never-mind! I just found a fantastic review of the product that answered all my questions:
https://www.suitetake.com/2009/09/24/review-cache-a-lto-4-a-series/
But Jeremy, if you have anything to add from your own experience, I’d love to hear.
Michael
-
I’ve been researching backup systems for about a year now with the proliferation of disk-based footage. The Cache-A seems to be the best, but at a price-point that was too high.
I also was archiving all footage, projects, etc on single SATA drives, but it’s just too risky without redundancy. Here’s my interim solution until either the Cache-A becomes for cost-justifiable or another technology emerges.
I bought a Lacie 10TB ethernet-based Raid-5 unit for about $1200. I can reliably store/backup quite a bit of data, and if a drive goes down, I simple drop a new one in. If i need another 10TB, I get another ethernet cable, another unit, and simple plug it in.
Since it’s on the network, all computers can see it. It also has a web-based interfaced if you decide to use it that way. Again, this is an interim solution for me until the back-up market matures.
-
One of the reasons we stepped up to the ProCache was that you could connect SATA drivers right to the device. Prime cache is USB only.
This is good for drives coming out of the field. Just plug them in and go.
We also have another computer on our network (iMac) with a small raid5 attached to it. This one we use as kind of the holding pattern for archives from our edit machines. Once a project is ready for archive off of the main machines we use CCC and clone only the data we want to the iMac. At that point you can either mount the iMac storage as a share to the ProCache or drag the data over to the ProCache drive. Its highly flexible to fit whatever works best for you.
True shared storage would be even faster.
-
I hear you, John and that sounds like a decent interim.
I thought about something like that, but I also wanted offsite redundancy. With the LTO tapes, we can keep an entire copy of our archive offsite. I make a second tape right away.
Also, when we started looking around for a solution we had about 30-35 TBs to archive. Then double that for the offsite copy. 10TBs would have been a blip on the radar! 😉
Fwiw, LTO is very mature. It is the vey reason that a lot of industries entrust their data to this technology. Banking, IT, etc.
Jeremy
-
Since the inception of our company over two years ago we have been constantly searching for the right cost effective method to archive all of our P-2 and before/beyond media. Last April we finally settled on a package that consists of a Quantum Scalar i40 LTO4 tape library and Retrospect 8.0 Single Server backup software running on one of our Mac Pro edit stations. We just established an ingest/backup station that we plan on moving the unit on to.
Not including the Mac Pro, total cost including cables and ATTO Express SAS H380 card came in just under $8k. We had some fits and starts getting the system up and going but once we resigned ourselves to the fact that Retrospect support is poor at best and started figuring things out for ourselves the operation has worked very smoothly. I don’t mean to say that the people at Retrospect don’t want to be helpful, it’s just that the product changed ownership several times right after we purchased it and no one on the support side seemed to know much about the product. Sadly, Retrospect seems to be the only product that would run on a Mac and was supported by Quantum. Anyway, once we figured out the pitfalls of the process, the system has been rolling along quite well since May.
The beauty of the system is that it is capable of holding 25 LTO tapes at a time. Once you have established your media set (a quantity of LTO tapes needed to store all your material in a backup session) you can connect multiple hard drives and set the system in motion to work unsupervised over the weekend without anyone having to drop by to change tapes. Once you get the procedural workflow down it is easy to operate.
The system is networkable and seems to have most of the benefits of the CacheA in some form. We have found it most beneficial to our workflow to keep the unit connected locally. It is somewhat noisy when in operation as was described about the CacheA. The physical size is big, it is 32″ deep and 19″ wide.
Right now we have it sitting on a file cabinet next to the desk.Not ever having had anything to do with backup storage before this, the process overall has been fairly painless and something I am happy to recommend to others.
There are many other details I can share if anyone is interested.
Happy New Year!
Lin Brummett,
Warm Springs Productions -
Well, I bought a Quantum LTO-4 (Model B) Half-Height Drive TC-L42BX, a SCSI drive and an ATTO Express PCI UL5D for my Mac, and this process is a bear, a living grizzly bear and it is not finished yet. I have been on the phone and writing everyone and simply cannot get it to work. I’m trying Retrospect 8 and I can see the drive in Storage Devices, it shows up in System Profiler, but no ability to work with it. I have been at this for over two months and wonder if I did the right thing. Next I will try to trade out terminators, as the one I got from Electronics Plus may not be as specific for the ATTO card or the Quantum drive. I regret going the SCSI route. I regret not getting a system from someone like ProMax. I don’t have the coin to get a Cache-A or similar device and only want to back up my XDCam footage in case drives go out. I figure something like this is likely better than mirrored drives, as I can always fetch the footage if something goes wrong with a drive. Well it has been frustrating and I am not finished with the frustration yet.
Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org -
Crap, Greg. I’m really sorry to hear that.
I hope you can get it sorted out soon.
Jeremy
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up