So, it’s 2026 and things are the same or worst. We just went through the ordeal of our old machine dying, with the BRU License and working software inside… Even the latest ArGest release from 2022 has a very buggy GUI on modern Apple Silicon, so that was not feasable (tried it and had many aborted or partial restores)

We ended up coding our own…

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Sorry. I posted twice. Thought I was still editing 🙂

Closing the loop on this one, since TOLIS went under in 2020, bought by OWC, and then fully deprecated by 2022… Missing catalog files is not fatal. Catalog data can be found on the tapes themselves and the restore index rebuilt from there.

When the software died, and then our old machine died (with the only working software license), we decided…

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An update for anybody landing here in 2026: the CLI walkaround works until it doesn’t, and every time there was a new MacOS update it made the walkaround more difficult. If your tapes are physically healthy, the data is safe. Don’t worry.

In my studio I went through the same madness. We had a 20 LTO tape vault written in BRU. I always thought I…

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For anyone still finding this thread: chasing old macOS versions to keep BRU PE limping along stops working at some point, and the GUI never ran natively on Apple Silicon at all. The tapes themselves are fine, it is the software path that is gone.

Two practical things before you change anything else: if a machine that last ran BRU PE successfully…

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Thanks Neil, appreciate you taking the time to look through the site. Please let me know your honest thoughts!

Keeping a couple of old Macs alive is exactly how everyone has survived this, and for healthy tapes with intact catalogs it still works. What finally pushed us to build our own path were the other cases: catalogs dead or missing, ArGest…

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Nobody ever answered this one, so for the next person who finds it: an LTO-6 written by BRU PE that ArGest refuses to restore is a software problem, not a tape problem. The data is almost always still sitting there intact.

We were in the same position with our own vault. Our LTO backup masters were on BRU PE tapes and the supported paths all…

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Late reply, but for anyone landing here from search: this exact symptom, a tape that verifies clean while the Import Tool reports No Archive Catalog Found, does not mean your data is gone. The catalog BRU wrote to the tape itself is usually still intact and the archives are readable even when the desktop software cannot rebuild its own database…

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