free or low cost tape backup software? (and is there a point)

[Matthew Jones]

I had like to share my experience on free conventional software vs a paid tool.
I had issues with Time Machine especially with the email backups. the background story: I receive roughly 100-120 mails every day and my my Mailbox would fill up every other month. I use POP since then, thus making emails more of system dependent.
But the retrieval was damn complicated and time taking.
Later I used Mail Backup X. This is a paid tool. The 15 day free trial went pretty well. easily retrieval at the other side as well. Mail Backup X offers Mirror Backup option, that enables me to keep a copy of backup automatically to Ext. HD. That ends my dependency on the Mac’s performance.
Paid tools make your job much easier.

[Joaquín Gómez]

Hi Tim Jones,

We are considering keeping Tolis software, BRU Server, in our production company, but after trying to solve an incident and not even receive an answer, we were considering an alternative.
I do not know if it will help to contact you here, but it is our last attempt, we do not understand that although we do not have a license with support at this time, it has only not been answered once and with a meaningless response, and after this They have not answered us, even insisting on three occasions that we would worry about paying a license or if there was any form of payment support.

This is the last case number:
# 19-195868
Which as of today have not answered us after two weeks.

Thanks in advance and greetings.

[Justin Stephenson]

This is a super necro post. It’s just heartbreaking to read this thread here. I had been 15 years into TOLIS BRU LTO Archives when Tolis went under. I was initially very hopeful that OWC would update and maintain the project. It’s an excellent archiving format with built-in checksumming and it is super fast with frame sequences (I’m in animation so millions of files+ are not unheard of). I think that BRU GUI applications were really hurt by their complex and unwieldy database/server/client experience. As a format on tape, BRU is awesome.

I found that LTFS was really not a good solution for complex media projects given the path restrictions and writing inefficiencies with small files. Solutions like Preroll Post were unbelievably awkward and IBM’s recent decision to discontinue LTFS support for Windows really put the final chill on LTFS as a future forward solution for me.

I love LTO – $100 CAD for 12TB of stable storage is amazing. I do disk to disk to tape X 2 archives and end up going back to tape once or twice a year for assets or full on project recalls when the nearline disk archive is unavailable/

I am now working with TAR on Linux using some scripts to do my cold storage archiving to LTO8. I break projects into 500GB folders, pull xxhash strings for future verification, pretar the folders, pull metadata including tar byte offsets and then write these to LTO while recording the block numbers for each TAR for use in an SQLite database so I can find everything.

My goal was to mitigate any proprietary format changes in the future. It’s not a perfect solution and requires some doing in Python or shell script (AI helps a lot with this), but I think open standards, not tied to proprietary formats, is the way to go for cold storage archives. I’ve got another 20 years of studio left in me and I do not want to migrate archives again.

I find nearline backups are best handled using mirrored NASes with shapshotting, C2 or backblaze etc.

For interchange and delivery, sure, LTFS. For stuff I want around for years, TAR is “forever”.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Justin,

I hate to admit it, but I still have a large stack of Betacam SP, Digital Betacam and HD-CAM + various DV, HDV and VHS tapes floating around under my bed, and in various boxes – and today, there is still not a cheaper storage format than tape, except when the emulsion paints the heads in the VTR…

I suspect that it will either be cloud based (AWS, Azure, Google etc) or SSD drives that wiull be the way forward. I did buy a stack of BlueRay blank discs, but not as solid as I would like it.

The alternative is to ditch the old source “files”, and just save the masters…
SORRY! That is not the right way to do it.
But many of the big brioadcasters did just that back in the 1990’s when there was not enough Betacam SP tapes in the world, and they have continued to do so when they moved to camera-cards.

Sorry, the above is not helpful.

However, even if not in your territory, can I suggest that you reach out to Peter Rowsell at Polar Graphics, who is based in the farm-country belt of London, UK. Apart from Peter having represented most of the known on-line, and near-online data-storage systems and software for the media business, he also knows alot of other stuff. And, might just help you connect a few missing dots to build something that will last you the 20-years.

Magstor is one of their products:

https://polar-graphics.com/magstor/#MagstorProducts

If you do catch up with Peter, please send him my best regards and let him know that I have not forgotten, neither ghosting him, just been busy. But my eternal gratitude to him remains intact. 🙂

Hope that this helps?

Atb
Mads

polar-graphics.com

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[Justin Stephenson]

Thanks @mads. I am pretty set here now. I’m using a rigorous archiving structure with PAX GNU TAR on LTO8 with all the metadata in an SQLite database. I built a nice little pyqt interface and some automation scripts which makes archiving a breeze. It’s not perfect but it works for my use-case – it’s all open standards and I am no longer beholden to the whims of a proprietary format.

I’m in Canada and am using a Magstor branded HH LTO-8 drive. You get a hedge container license with the drive, but LTFS is not a useful solution for me given the path limitations, uncertain future and poor small-file performance.

Anyways – I hear you about the BetaSP and DBeta tapes. I bought a deck a while ago and managed to digitize all the important stuff before it finally failed.

Keep it all!