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The ‘T’ word
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Bob,
We publish a revised manual with every software release and install it on every system with the update. We also will email a copy to anyone who requests it. Your point that it should be posted on our web site is reasonable and we will consider doing so.
-Tom
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Hi Tom,
Thanks for taking the time to respond, but I just can’t let this go by without a bit of a squawk!
$US 6,995 (Bob’s figure) equals $AU 7,309 the list price here was $AU 11,841.36. Thats four and a half grand difference!!!! I can fly to New York ($1200) buy it over the counter and fly home again and still have change.. a lot of change. Someone somewhere is gouging. Or you are not allowing sufficient margin for your dealers to make an honest living. It may be that the US market is sufficiently lucrative that you don’t care about overseas sales (and that’s fine – it’s your business). But please don’t expect me to swallow the “Great Service” line with that sort of price gap. And don’t expect a huge number of sales down here, the fact is we are a small market, but this does nothing to open it up.
There! I feel better now…Respectfully,
Charles.
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why buy it from your local dealer? Buy in in the US, have it shipped to you, and WE will help you support it (and so will Cache-A) – it’s really easy, the documentation is great, and a long distance phone call to US Cache-A support is a lot cheaper than a flight to the US, or getting ripped off by your local dealer.
We recently installed an entire shared storage solution for “The Solid State” in Australia, and did the entire install via Apple iChat, and it worked great, and they did not get “ripped off” by any local dealers.
Bob Zelin
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Just discovered this forum, and am so glad the COW has created it.
As for a lower-budget solution: if you have a fast network & an old (SCSI-capable) PC lying around, you can get a far-less-expensive LTO drive, add it to the PC, hook into your Mac via the network, and you’re done – for a fraction of the price of the “right way to do it.” Mine is an HP LTO3 external drive, current cost about $2k (US).
I would love to have the Cache-A, LTO5, and hope to have it some day. But if I had the choice between no LTO backup and LTO3, I’d take the LTO3.
Good luck. Those hard drives are NOT an archive, just a disappointment waiting to happen.
Bob C
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Bob, I totally agree that any way you can get your content onto data tape, you are better protected than with hard drives. But, I’d have to take issue with your statement:
[Bob Cole] “add it to the PC, hook into your Mac via the network, and you’re done”What software are you going to use to write to that tape? How are you going to keep track of what content you put on what tape. The challenges associated with finding and recovering a single clip from your archive in such a solution make the effort questionable.
I’d also ask, how long did it take you to source that tape drive? To install it with appropriate drivers? To install and get up and running on your archive software? How much did that software cost? How long to develop an adequate workflow that gets your edit workstation content onto that PC? How much time and effort to archive a complete project? How much is your time worth?
We call this a “roll your own” archiving solution, and I’ve written a white paper that goes into the approach in more depth (go here to get your copy). Yes, $6k is a lot of money for our entry LTO-4 product, but it solves all of these issues with a single appliance-like box that connects to your network, gives you a dead simple drag-and-drop means to archive anything, keeps track of every file on every one of your tapes, and lets you get back that single clip almost as easily as if it were on a hard drive.
Tom Goldberg
Cache-A Corporation
602 Park Point Drive
Golden, CO 80401
mailto:tom.goldberg@cache-a.com
https://cache-a.com -
Tom, it should have taken me forever, because I am not an expert. But my Retrospect software (which I already owned) recognized the drive, works across the network, and can find and restore any file or folder quite rapidly. I admit that I did waste a lot of time at first, transferring files to the PC’s hard drive, before I realized that the software worked across the network.
As for what my time is worth, thank you for the compliment! I’d like you to take that up with my clients. Maybe you could make a better case than I have, lately!
I absolutely lust after your company’s solutions. If I were paying an assistant to manage data, I would be a customer, because it would pay off very rapidly.
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Well thank you for the compliment as well Bob.
It sounds like Retrospect has come a long since I last looked. I would note that your Retrospect tapes are still written in their proprietary format only readable by a copy of that software… and they are now on their third (or is it their 4th?) owner now with Roxio.
We write with tar format, and open standard that’s been around since the 70’s. And with our next release and on LTO-5 drives our appliances will have the option of writing with the new LTFS open standard.
Tom Goldberg
Cache-A Corporation
602 Park Point Drive
Golden, CO 80401
mailto:tom.goldberg@cache-a.com
https://cache-a.com -
Tom of Cache-A, have you any thoughts to share regarding AXF (Archive Xchange format)?
Thank you all for adding to my modest enlightenment around archival solutions.
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Hi Les,
AXF seems to have come and gone and come again… it is our understanding that it is still in SMPTE committee and is not even an RP yet. Also we believe the principle adopters will only be the 1 or 2 companies participating in the specification.
Cache-A will certainly continue to watch this development closely and add this to our bag of tricks if it looks like it will bring real benefits to our customers. If any readers of this thread are fans of AXF, we’d like to hear about it.
Tom Goldberg
Cache-A Corporation
602 Park Point Drive
Golden, CO 80401
mailto:tom.goldberg@cache-a.com
https://cache-a.com
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