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OT: SDLT. Anyone using these for long term storage?
Since we have been shooting more and more tapeless, I have gigs and gigs of gigs that I need to back up. DVD-R is way too small and time consuming, and I don’t really trust sticking a hard drive on a shelf (call me nuts, but it’s not good enough for me). Has anyone DLT to back up their stuff? Quantum has a new one that’s operates on GigE and I was wondering if this is a viable method?
Thanks for any insight.
Jeremy
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4 Replies
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cheap smaller SATA drives are a teriffic way to do long term backup- and you don’t have to restore when you want to use it – just plug it in, and away you go. With 500 Gig drives going for about $329 these days, you can get 160 gig drives for under 100 bucks – and that sure beats DLT tapes.
Bob Zelin
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I have used DLT for years to backup projects: a DLT IV on my Avid Xpress, and now an SDLT-1 for my FCP system. Both have been extremely reliable and I’m able to restore any project I’ve ever done.
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Thanks for the repsonses, guys. Bob, I know you love the SATA, but I don’t yet. I was burned and burned bad. It still hurts. Plus there’s no more room in my poor ole G5 for a SATA slot.
Bill, i have cross posted this on other forums here on the cow and everyone in the FCP forum said that it was doggedly slow. This is just for archival purposes and speed isn’t really my main concern, but what do you think about the speed? I need to back up 250-300 Gigs at a time. I will wait hours to do this, but not days. Any thoughts?
Jeremy
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We are strongly considering a purchase of a Quantum SDLT 600A. SATA backup burned us too, so we are looking into this solution. I saw this drive at NAB and even though it is a tape drive, the catalog file structure and the fact that’s drag and drop seem to make it feel a lot more like a random access drive, but with the reliability of tape. I used to use DLT drives for all my backing up and they never failed on me, but the backup and restore process was a nightmare. Especially in a situation where a client wanted a single photoshop file off a 20GB tape. When we switched to DVD-RAM we gained the file flexibility but lost a lot of the space benefits (and now with an HD job DVD RAM is obviously useless). So I don’t have the Quantum up and running yet, but will definitely report back when we do purchase it and let you know our findings. On paper it appears to be the perfect compromise we’re looking for in terms of ease of file management and also large data storage, but I guess that remains to be seen. Has anyone out there had a chance to use one of these drives yet?
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