OWC – Tolis Group – BRU Status

[Bob Zelin]

you actually think that Tolis Bru is coming back ? Really ? Have you not read the discussions on this forum ? I want you to sing it with me now – “its over ……..”

Bob

[Neil Sadwelkar]

As Bob said, quit waiting and move on.

Those who have a huge collection of Bru written LTO tapes, and working system with a Bru install, don’t worry, Bru itself will continue to work till the machines work. So your data is safe.

If your tapes are old, LTO4 or LTO5 then in any case you need to transition them to LTO7 or LTO8 because a working LTO drive that can read LTO4 or LTO5 tapes is not going to be around much longer.

12 LTO4 tapes can be restored to a 12TB hard drive and then to 1 LTO8 tape. You can then reuse the 12TB drive, or buy as many as you need. So if you have a 100 Bru written LTO4 tapes, you can fit them on just 8 LTO8 tapes, and have 8 hard drive backups for instant access too.

5 years from now, you can take those 8 12TB drives, and copy them to 2 50TB drives which will be available by then. And so on.

Similarly, 7 LTO5 tapes can fit on one 12TB hard drive and then be copied to one LTO8 tape.

To write LTO8 LTFS tapes, you can use a variety of LTFS software. A system that can run the last version of Bru and the latest version of any LTFS software is easily available now. But may not be in the future. As newer systems move to Big Sur, and Apple Silicon, a Bru compatible system would be hard to come by in about 3 years from now.

At least in this transition, you have a software (Bru PE) that’s free for restore, and still available. Think of those ho have hundreds of tapes written in Windows NTBackup or Retrospect, or some other proprietary LTO software which ran on a version of Windows that’s no longer available.

I’m in India and due to the Covid situation, I know of many LTO systems and people sitting idle. If anyone needs a large number of Bru tapes to be restored and transitioned to LTFS, you can contact me at neilsadwelkar at me dot com.

Even if you’re not confident of sending out the tapes, and if you don’t have the time to do this, as long as you have a working Bru system, and can arrange for the tapes to be changed, I could have someone do the transition remotely from here.

[Scott Moore]

They’re back… went quiet for awhile but they have officially launched the “OWC branded” ArGest

https://www.argestsoftware.com/backup/

I know it’s old and i should move on but i have about 30 blank LTO5 tapes left and them I’m moving on to a new backup system and a new agency structure so this is just to get everything tidied up and then I’m moving on 🙂

[Bob Zelin]

you do know, that LTO5 is over. We currently live in the LTO7/LTO8 world. Modern drives won’t read LTO5 tapes.

and

https://www.lto.org/lto-9/

LTO drive generations 1-7 are able to read tapes from two generations prior and are able to write to tapes from the prior generation.

LTO-8 drives can read and write to LTO-7 and LTO-8 media, including
LTO-7 Type M.

LTO-9 drives will be able to read and write to LTO-8 and LTO-9 media only.

“but I can’t keep spending money – I need something that will last for 30 years” –

shut up, and hand over your wallet – (the statement of the electronics industry).

[Scott Moore]

Yea i know, just trying to use up all the old tapes i have for some of my old projects.

Then the plan is to park all the LTO5 system for recovery only and look to invest in LTO8 going forward, if i can afford it!

I’ve got 150+ LTO5 tapes and don’t really fancy merging all of those onto 7 or 8… that would be a full time job 🤦‍♂️