Tolis BRU-PE anyone?

[Walter Soyka]

I use BRU PE. It works very well.

It’s probably not as user-friendly as Cache-A, but all my BRU backups and restores have worked beautifully, and I sleep better at night with my work on LTO-5.

(2 copies of each LTO, that is. If you only have one copy of a piece of data, you are a quick accident or equipment failure away from having zero copies.)

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

[Jason Lyons]

Thanks for the input Walter. Curious abour a couple of things based on your expience. Are you using LTFS or TAR format?

Less user friendly than CacheA doesnt sound very user friendly at all. I found CacheA’s interface to be not very user friendly, sometimes clunky. Ideally I would like to have the flexibility of LTFS format and find a tool to catalog all of the contents on the Tape. BRU looks promising I just am not that familiar with it yet. So, do you find the software to be helpful when reviewing offline items you wish to restore?

[Walter Soyka]

[Jason Lyons] “Are you using LTFS or TAR format?”

BRU doesn’t use tar. See the tar-BRU whitepaper [link] for more.

I am currently using the BRU format, though I would consider switching to LTFS.

[Jason Lyons] “Ideally I would like to have the flexibility of LTFS format and find a tool to catalog all of the contents on the Tape. BRU looks promising I just am not that familiar with it yet. So, do you find the software to be helpful when reviewing offline items you wish to restore?”

I generally archive and restore entire projects at a time; I don’t search for individual elements. BRU has filename search, but cannot search or sort any other metadata that I am aware of.

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

[Sara Axelsson]

Hi!

I’m having a archive problem with BRU PE and you, Walter, seem to know a deal about the program.

The thing is that I have a LTO5 tape that I’m tying to archive about 850GB to. The tape should take the whole archival for sure but instead BRU PE asks for an additional tape ! The tape was completely new so this is very strange. Are there some boxes I need to check? I have double-checked the tape in fact is LTO5 so the way I see it there must be some thing I need to do in the BRU PE program….

I apologize if this question interferes with the topic.

BR
Sara

We are using BRU PE Version 2.3.3 on a MAC OS X Server. Version 10.6.8

[Walter Soyka]

Sara, you’re right that this should be no problem. Are you certain the tape is blank? Can you try another tape?

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

[Jason Lyons]

Sara,
We have had pretty good success with our Tolis system and running BRU/PE. I have not run into the problem you have explained, wish I could be more helpful. So far when and if I run into such a hiccup I have found great success with contacting Tolis Support, those guys really know what’s going on. Their number is 480-505-1814.

Oh and a belated thanks to Walter for sharing your thoughts and experiences prior to our purchase.

Hope this helps
Jason

[Sara Axelsson]

Yes I’m. I removed the plastic around it myself. Have you heard anything like this?

[Robbie Coblentz]

Buffer setting can sometimes affect the efficiency or writing to tape. I’v head some archives that i thought would fit easily on a LTO 3, but need an additional tape because the way BRU slices the data up and feeds to the LTO. At least that’s how it was roughly explained to me.