Promise Pegasus R4 8tb RAID config?

[Joseph W. bourke]

And don’t forget a set of drives off-site. No amount of backup will do you any good if it’s melted and crispy in the basement of a burned out facility.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Michael Gissing]

Good idea to backup the comment with an extra copy Joseph 🙂

[Herb Sevush]

[David Roth Weiss] “In case of RAID failure, LTO backup would get you back up and running in a day, or within 4 to 5 hours possibly. The near-line solution gets you up and running almost instantly, or in an hour or so for most projects.”

My situation may be specific but assuming the “near term” backup is a firewire 800 drive, I would still have to transfer that material to a raid for actual use. Unless I’m misreading things Firewire 800 is 800 Mb/s (mega bits). The LTO 5 spec is for 140 MB/s (mega bytes) – which equals 1120 Mb/s or nearly 50% faster. So I don’t see the time saving for hard drives. Now I could definitely have screwed up the math somewhere along the way, but for the moment I just don’t see the hard drive advantage.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Walter Soyka]

I have online storage (direct-attached external RAIDs on a Mac Pro and Z800), nearline storage (12 TBs of capacity on an iSCSI Drobo), and offline storage (LTO5 backup).

While the LTO5 tape does transfer faster than the Drobo (though not for me, as I access my LTO tape system over gigabit Ethernet), LTO is physically offline — the tape I need is rarely the tape in the drive. You have to pull the correct tape off the shelf and load it in before you can transfer your content. If the archive is larger than 1.5 TB, you need to switch tapes (both for archive and restore). Tape is just not as convenient as true nearline storage.

I break my projects down into hot, warm, and cold — active, recent, and old — and sort my storage accordingly.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Moody Glasgow]

Actually FW800 is 400 Megabyte/sec or 3200Mbit/s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#FireWire_800_.28IEEE_1394b-2002.29

LTO5 is not faster then FW800.

moody glasgow
smoke/flame
http://www.thereelthinginc.com

[Walter Soyka]

[moody glasgow] “Actually FW800 is 400 Megabyte/sec or 3200Mbit/s. “

The spec provides for speeds up to 3.2 Gb/s. I’m not aware of any devices or controllers that actually support the full spec. Everything I know of in production does top out at 800 Mb/s.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Bob Cole]

[Walter Soyka] “Tape is just not as convenient as true nearline storage.”

I agree with Weiss and Soyka. I use a similar pattern, in my case RAID 5 (CalDigit), hard drives, and LTO-3. Although the software (Retrospect) with which I copy to LTO-3 has very good indexing, it is true that for ease of retrieval, hard drives are the backup of choice. My Mac Pro’s three internal “extra” SATA drives are a wonderful way to make and park quick backups of critical material, when I have “drop-dead”-lines and can’t afford to lose an hour.

I am looking forward, when it gets a bit less expensive, to switching to LTO-5 or LTO-6. But even then, tape presents a dilemma as to just how to organize the backups. Currently, I backup by project or client. That makes it much easier to reload the material, because when I do have to reload data, it is always for a given project. But it is a lot less efficient to do the backup that way, which means I wind up NOT doing tape backups as often as I would like. Due to the limited capacity of LTO-3 tape, I think I’m locked into that method for now. But for people like Walter, with LTO-5, do you just have the tape system backup everything that is new, every day? And if so, do you find that to be crippling when it comes to retrieval of data, in a pinch? Because I have several projects happening at once, and if I were to backup daily, the material for any one project might be spread over several tapes, and the material for any one CLIENT would be spread over many, many tapes.

Reloading material is a regular requirement, even if your RAID never fails. Whenever I reload material from an LTO tape, it is because I thought the project was finished, and had deliberately deleted it from the RAID — and not once because the RAID had failed. My CalDigit has been fantastic; when a drive died, I had a new one ready to pop in and it rebuilt the RAID redundancy in a couple of hours.

Bob C

[Walter Soyka]

[Bob Cole] “But for people like Walter, with LTO-5, do you just have the tape system backup everything that is new, every day? And if so, do you find that to be crippling when it comes to retrieval of data, in a pinch? Because I have several projects happening at once, and if I were to backup daily, the material for any one project might be spread over several tapes, and the material for any one CLIENT would be spread over many, many tapes.”

I consider backup to be separate from archive.

I run continuous backups to the cloud, nightly backups of active projects to local hard drive, and a scheduled weekly backup to tape.

Having only one copy of a project on one tape (in one location) would only make me feel marginally safer than one copy on hard drive. You’re just a tape failure away from having no copies of the project.

When a project is finished, I archive the entire project twice: once onto a tape set for the current year’s projects, and once onto a tape set for the client’s projects. One set stays in the office, and one set comes home with me. It will also stay on nearline storage as long as there is room, and is ultimately removed on a FIFO basis.

It’s a lot of work, but I think my diligence about project organization and data safety gives me fast, strong retrieval capabilities, and I consider them to be competitive advantages.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Andrew Richards]

[moody glasgow] “Actually FW800 is 400 Megabyte/sec or 3200Mbit/s. “

Read your link again:

“IEEE 1394b-2002 introduced FireWire 800 (Apple’s name for the 9-conductor “S800 bilingual” version of the IEEE 1394b standard). This specification and corresponding products allow a transfer rate of 786.432 Mbit/s full-duplex via a new encoding scheme termed beta mode.”

The part later that reads “The full IEEE 1394b specification supports data rates up to 3200 Mbit/s (i.e., 400 megabytes/s) over beta-mode or optical connections up to 100 metres (330 ft) in length” references the IEEE standard, but is not representative of the FW800 that you would ever see in actual use. In any implementation on the market, FW800 means 786.432 Mbit/s or 98.304 MBytes/sec.

So yeah, LTO-5’s 140 MBytes/sec data rate is faster than FW800.

Best,
Andy

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ” You’re just a tape failure away from having no copies of the project.”

I look at back-up differently. For me there are 2 different things to back up. 1 – Original camera sources recorded tapeless, 2 – Project media.

For project media, everyday backup to external hard drives and thumb drives works fine. At the end of the project I’ve been consolidating each job on hard drives; soon I hope to have a dedicated LTO tape for each major job to include all projects, graphics and music.

But it’s backing up tapeless camera sources that has me most concerned. We started going tapeless last season and I have a set of five 3tb drives in two different locations as backup. I envision changing that workflow so that as soon as I dump everything to my main raid I then copy all the camera sources to LTO5. Once that’s done and the tapes are in storage I can breathe easy again. I’ve never lost anything to tape loss in 30 years of editing, the same can not be said about hard drive failure. In this new workflow I can see no reason to also back up the camera sources to hard drives. If my raid fails it’s going to take a day to restore and rebuild no matter what the source. If it’s a matter of restoring old material, that never happens without some notice, and I don’t see the big speed loss with tape since everything I work with has to be moved to the raid before I edit.

I’m definitely not as thorough as Walter in my backup plan, and one day it will probably come back to haunt me, but backup strategy like everything else is a matter of balance – how much risk vs. how much cost.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf