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Life After PreRollPost & LTO6 – In need of advice!
Hi all,
Hoping for some wisdom or experience here.
I work for an Irish TV production company, and when I started there was an archive system in place; using MAC and LTO’ing through a MLogic LTO6 tape deck using PreRoll Post as software and database.
Over the years it’s given us some issues – sent the deck away twice for repairs but it’s been pretty solid since. This last two weeks we’re getting ‘error6’ on the tape deck, and after many cleaning cycles, fresh tapes, power setups and talking to Dan at MLogic it looks like after all this time, the solution is most likely to update our tape deck.
Updating the tape deck isn’t an issue, we’ve gotten more than a decent life-span out of the other deck, but the potential issue comes with losing our PreRoll Post database. I see Imagine Products now have ‘MyLTO’ but it doesn’t offer databasing, so I’m wondering what other people did after the death of ‘PreRoll Post’??
Does anyone have a solid setup currently they could recommend?
We have roughly 300 LTO tapes archived with ‘PRP’ on LTO6, and have about 15 fresh tapes waiting to be used so ideally would like to still be able to write to the LTO6 tapes, and given the size of our library it seems obvious moving to LTO7 is our only choice to ensure we can still read all of our other tapes. So if we upgrade and purchase a LTO7 tape deck from MLogic what would be the best database software to use nowadays? I’ve heard of YoYotta, hedge and a few others and read through the forums here to see if I could get anymore information but would love to speak to someone more experienced than me in this – particularly since we’ve such a large back catalogue we don’t want to loose!
(Side note, what is the average realistic lifespan for LTO6 tapes? and should we be looking to migrate the whole system to LTO8 or LTO9 instead?)
If anyone reading this in Ireland, or even the UK specialises in this type of work please feel free to reach out to me as our company would be interested in chatting.
Thanks for reading, looking forward to hearing from someone (hopefully!)
Lisa
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3 Replies
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Hi Lisa, you could look at Archiware P5, https://archiware.com which is an archive-to-LTO solution with a browsable index of everything archived. Check out https://youtu.be/N8ArRIZcq_M?feature=shared for quick overview. Our USP is our MAM-like index that can also show thumbnails and proxies of media files in the archive. We run on any OS and work with any LTO hardware, single drives and libraries. We can import LTFS tapes from other systems also.
I am the UK distributor for this product at https://jpydistribution.com. You could contact us for UK reseller to discuss requirement with.
archiware.com
Data Management for Media and Entertainment | Archiware P5
Archiware P5 is a data management software for those in the media and entertainment industry to conveniently archive and backup to a single LTO drive.
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Indeed error 6 indicates a drive or tape issue. As you have tried multiple tapes then the drive probably needs repair. A new LTO-7 tape drive is a good idea as you can restore existing tapes and also create new archives. You can use LTO-7 tapes which are faster and have a larger capacity.
Ideally you should have at least two copies, each stored in a different stable environment, if this is the case then there is no immediate need to migrate the tapes.
If you just have one copy then you can start to restore your LTO-6 tapes and then create new archives on LTO-7 storing up to four LTO-6 tapes on each new tape. Regarding newer tape generations it depends on the amount of data that you will be creating. At the moment I would stick to the LTO-7 drive and then reassess the situation in a year or two. LTO-10 stores up to 30TB but is currently expensive, but in the future when the price comes down for drives and media then your 300 tapes would fit on about 20 LTO-10 tapes.
If you have indexes of each tape in the PreRoll Post database then you should be able to export these as CSV files. Then when needing a file you can search the CSV to give you the tape name.
It’s then easy to index that tape and restore selected files, folders or the entire tape using an app that supports LTFS. Our YoYotta software with LTO drive support allows you to do this and you can test the workflow using our demo version.
You can then start to index the other tapes using YoYotta. Note that YoYotta does not import PreRoll Post CSV files. Whilst you have 300 tapes it only takes a few minutes to index each tape and you will then have an accurate snapshot. YoYotta can also be used to verify existing LTO-6 tapes.
I hope this helps, please get in touch if you need more workflow advice.
Martin Greenwood
CTO
YoYotta
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It’s been a month since you posted. Did you find a solution?
Some thoughts, in case you’re still looking for answers.
Like Martin said, the LTO drive seems to be bust and will need replacement.
LTO-6 tapes can be read only in an LTO-6 or a LTO-7 tape drive. So you need to buy one or the other. Chances are, they might even be costing nearly the same. Since you’re near the UK, you could take a look at Symply LTO drives. They are Thunderbolt drives so you won’t need all the SAS adapters in between.
Your tapes are written with Pre-Roll Post so they are LTFS. It’s been a while since I used pre-Roll Post, but my guess is that tapes written with PRP can be read by mounting them with YoYotta or Canister. And, once mounted with YoYotta, you can ‘index’ the tapes using either DiskCatalogMaker or NeoFinder. Or, you could even store their contents in the YoYotta internal database.
It’s a tedious process, inserting the tape, mounting it, and then scanning it and repeating that for 300 tapes. At 5 mins per tape you should be done in 3 working days.
About the longevity of the LTO tapes, chances are you’ll be able to access the data on them only as long as you have a compatible LTO drive. For eg. LTO-2 tape written in, say, 2004 can still be read but getting a LTO-2 or LTO-3 or LTO-4 drive is quite challenging in 2025. And if you do find one, keeping it working indefinitely is also non-trivial.
That will be the outcome of your LTO-6 tapes about 10 years, or maybe even 5 from now. So, migrating LTO-6 tapes to a generation higher, every 5 or so years, is the only way to keep the data accessible.
Currently, LTO-8 is stable and cost-effective. LTO-9 has a higher failure rate. And is expensive. 5-6 LTO-6 tapes can fit inside one LTO-8 tape. But, for this ‘migration’ you’ll need one LTO-6 or 7 drive, a reasonable amount of hard disk space to offload the LTO-6 tapes temporarily, and then one LTO-8 drive to write the data to LTO-8 tapes. 300 LTO-6 tapes will shrink into about 50-60 LTO-8 tapes.
I’ve done this migration for some media companies. Some even remotely. If you need help and handholding, write to me at neil *at* digitaldada *dot* in.
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