Looking for Workflow – Backing Up Many TB to Quantum Tape Drive

[Tim Jones]

With BRU Producer’s Edition, your workflow is drag, drop, click. BRU PE writes your data to tape using the folder layout that you have on your disk(s) and then allows you to search all known archives by those same folder / filename parameters for restoring a single clip, a folder, or an entire archive. Additionally, its catalog format are gzipped, pipe-delimited flat text files that are easily imported into tools such as Excel, Numbers, CD Finder or custom database apps if you need to track clip info outside of the BRU PE environment.

BRU PE will work with your existing Quantum LTO-5 drive and provide a very reliable verification capability to insure that the data is safely stored on the tapes (or even make multiple tapes of the same data) so that you can safely remove the original data from your working drives to free up space.

If you haven’t taken a look at it yet, you can download a fully functional 30 day demo from the Production Backup website.

https://www.productionbackup.com

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Ian Smith]

Thank you for your assistance!

I am backing up the CalDigit HDPro as I write. I have selected the HDPro array, and using BRU PE, I now have it backing up.

This will take up about 5 1.5T tapes in all. As I make changes to projects currently being backed up, what do I need to do to reassure these changes are also backed up? Will I select the “append” option, and tell it to backup? I assume BRU PE will ask me for specific tapes in order to update these changes? Or am I completely misunderstanding how this should work?

Thanks,

Ian

Ian Smith

[Tim Jones]

Hi Ian,

Glad that you’re giving BRU PE a workout!

You would use BRU PE’s “incremental” selection option from the Advanced mode to only add the changed files (BRU will do this automatically). Check out the manual in chapter 6 for specifics.

These incremental operations can be appended to tapes, or written to new tapes. For all BRU products, there is no required relationship between full archives/backups and incremental archives/backups. You could write you full jobs to LTO-5 media and then write your incremental jobs to another eSATA or SAS drive for temporary storage until you next run a full job for that data.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Ian Smith]

That’s really good news to hear, and helpful information!

Currently, I’m working on figuring out why BRU isn’t recognizing it’s own tape backup when trying to verify. I ran a backup of the entire CalDigit HDPro. It estimated 5 tapes. It ran three before beginning a verification process. It then asked for the first media set, but then stated it was either an empty tape, or non-BRU data. – I’m attempting the same backup, and selected to “overwrite” all existing data.

It’s possible I grabbed a tape I thought was empty, but was from my first go-round when I used Retrospect. I found that software to no longer be supported, so I switched to BRU-PE. Now I’m working to back everything up using it.

Thanks,

Ian

Ian Smith

[Tim Jones]

You can also check the tapes manually –

Leave BRU PE waiting for the tape and open a Terminal. In the terminal, type:

tapectl header | bru -gf –

Does that recognize the tape as a BRU tape?

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!