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LTO Archiving & Back Up Tape Management
I am an assistant editor for a post production house called Vertigo Post. We back up all of our data using LTO tapes & the Cache-A interface. We also catalogue our footage using CatDV.
I am looking for an efficient way to reference our offsite LTOs & pull up their contents & other important information about the tapes. We have some tapes that are written only once & then saved forever and other tapes which are recycled & hold only temporary back up contents.
I have been researching the CatDV Archiving Option, but I have some questions still. If you have experience with this function of CatDV I would really appreciate your reviews! Also, I can’t find a way to upgrade CATDV Pro to the Archiving option without buying the whole software again.
I am interested in other ways of being able to pull up lots of data about each tape quickly & easily without having to bring the tape onsite, load the tape & go through the Cache-a web interface. We deal with a constantly increasing media library and so our workflow needs to support growth.
I really appreciate any and all feedback on this!
Bekah Richter
Vertigo Post -
8 Replies
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Unfortunately, because the Cache-A drives are dedicated to their hardware and management, you will need to use a Cache-A compatible solution to use your existing hardware investment. The CatDV Pro update should allow you to manage the clip catalog much more directly, but I don’t believe it will allow you to do so after the fact (meaning that the archival must have been performed via CatDV). I don’t know of a way within CatDV to import and manage existing archived media.
Maybe check on the CatDV forum for a method for importing your existing tapes.
BTW – for BRU PE users, BRU PE will import the table of contents from LTFS tapes and allow you to search them without mounting the tapes to determine what they contain.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Hi Rebekah,
Your Cache-A has a variety of tools for finding out about content on tapes.
The built-in catalog can be searched at any time from the File Manager page without having to bring the tape back on site.
You can also get CSV dumps (Excel readable files) of any tape’s content in a variety of formats using the tricks in this tech brief: Cache-A Catalog Export Tools
BTW Tim, any Cache-A will automatically ingest any inserted LTFS tape’s index and add it to the searchable catalog.
I hope that helps!
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tom@tomgoldberg.com
https://cache-a.com -
Thanks Tim! I will look into this more on the CatDV forum. I really appreciate your help!
Bekah
Vertigo Post -
Tom,
I wasn’t aware Cache-A has a built in cataloguing function. Thank you for sharing! I would like to find a way to link the tape information to a searchable, tag-able database that my upper management can easily use (like Evernote, but something made more for this purpose). However, a spread sheet is an OK option for now. Just seems a little inefficient to me. I’m new to the archiving & backup game though so I’m learning as much as I can. Thank you so much for your advice! I’ll repost again with more questions or to share my solution.Bekah Richter
Vertigo Post -
Hi Bekah,
The catalog function is pretty basic to Cache-A systems – it sounds like you could use some time with the user manual which can be found on the Versions page of the UI or downloaded from here.
The system does support simple metadata tagging of folders and individual files and even your management can log in and search for filenames and metadata tags from the web interface.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tom@tomgoldberg.com
https://cache-a.com -
When I worked with Cat DV pro and LTO we just created custom fields for any information we wanted to know about what was on certain LTO tapes. Also just making sure we tagged all our media with what LTO it was on. Then you can do a nice search query for what’s on what LTO since the media will be tagged with it.
Not sure what Cache A’s integration abilities are with Cat DV, but we used SDNA to automate populating some of those customized fields in our Cat DV catalogs. So for example, when we cataloged media that was ready for backup, we would select all the media and go to one of our customized fields to “send to archive.” This sends it all to through the SDNA interface, which then once it’s all done archiving, it sends back LTO information to automatically populate into cat dv.
Hopefully that helps?
andreajbarnett.com
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When our BRU Server and the DAX BA plugin are combined with CatDV, you get the same functionality – everything (archival, purging, and retrieval) is managed right from within the CatDV app and the operators don’t need to know anything about the tape backup side of the equation.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Hi Bekah,
You may have already figured out a solution to this question, but you can also try using a backup tape management solution.
B&L makes tape management solutions that integrate with your backup applications so that you can have all your tape information – including backup jobs – easily accessible within the system. That way you don’t need to recall the tape unless necessary.
You can learn more on the site at https://www.bandl.com/solutions/tape-management/
Good luck!
Jennifer
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