[Luke Arndt]

Thanks for the response, Tim.

I’m very happy to announce that I found a solution! ☺

Turns out HP provides a command-line tool, called ltfscopy, that does exactly what I’m looking for. According to HP’s own PDF:

LTFS smart copy for fast data transfer from tape
Tape being a sequential access medium, retrieving large number of files from the tape requires
that the tape head has to seek the location of the file sequentially on the tape by winding the
tape back and forth many times until it reads all the files that needs to be copied. This causes
drastic delays when using the normal copy commands provided by the operating system because
those commands do not care about the location of the files on tape. When these commands are
used to copy multiple files from tape to disk or another tape it will result in poor data transfer
rates. The LTFS smart copy tool overcomes this limitation by rearranging the files to copy in such
a way that all files can be copied in just one pass of the head. This significantly reduces the total
seek time thus improving the overall performance for multi-file copy operations.

I tried it out, and it works very well and is so much faster than copying multiple files through Windows Explorer.

Whew. 🙂

[Luke Arndt]

Hi Mike,

The past week, I have been struggling with various LTFS issues within Windows 10, Server Essentials 2012 R2, and Server Essentials 2016. (I described my issue in more details https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/330/2344.

Long story short, many times when I would drag and drop multiple files over to the tape drive, the tape would write at a fast speed for several seconds, then pause, rewind, pause, fast-forward before continuing writing. This made file copying so much slower.

Anyway, I’ve been trying this setup with Windows 7, and so far things are working well with no unexpected interruption between files.

I’m not sure if my problem matches what you’re experiencing in Windows 10, but I wonder if Windows 10 doesn’t handle LTFS as well as 7 does?

[Luke Arndt]

To update this….

After much, much, much troubleshooting, I think I have ruled out the SAS card being the culprit. Using LTFS, if I drag and drop a large file, I will get a fast, consistent transfer (100+ MB/s) all the way through.

The problem occurs when copying multiple files, but I can’t detect a pattern. I copied over a dozen .mts (ranging from 100 MB to 2 GB) files from a hard drive to the tape, and the files fast with no break to stop/rewind/stop/fast-forward. If I select a few .iso files (1 to 2 GB) and copy, I get the fast rates for several seconds and then (presumably when the file has finished copying), I get the stop/rewind/stop/fast-forward cycle, and then the second file copies, the cycle repeats, and the third file copies.

This is repeatable, meaning I can copy those .mts files with no problem, yet for some reason there is a problem with the .iso files. These files are just examples too, as this type of behavior occurs when copying many different file types.

So needless to say this has me very confused!

I may end up using some third-party software, but it’s frustrating to be so close to having this work well. I just can’t figure out what’s going on here!

[Luke Arndt]

Thanks, David! Yes, I was aware of the need for the card and the software, which I guess brings me to another few questions.

Are there any particular cards (hopefully PCI Express) that you would recommend? Or if I buy any SAS HBA card am I in good shape?

Software-wise, do any of the LTO-6 (or 7) models have any advantages in terms of coming with their own well-regarded software? I have seen recommendations on this forum for third-party programs that I might want to purchase, but I was wondering if, say, a Dell or an HP comes with an especially good program.

Also, do you (or anybody else) have any thoughts on the idea of buying a used but working drive?

[Luke Arndt]

I tried this, but the Media Tool doesn’t seem to show offline clips.

[Luke Arndt]

Thanks, Shane.

In that case, is there any easy-ish way to copy all of the clips from various bins into one bin? Or am I still looking at opening each bin individually and then copying its clips to the “master” bin?

[Luke Arndt]

Nope, it doesn’t look like Vegas will accept the video or audio MXF files.

[Luke Arndt]

Sorry, I missed that! I’ll start a new thread. Thanks for the clarification.

[Luke Arndt]

I want to make sure I’m not missing something.

Already, without using your approach, if I sort by name within my bin I can see which files have been transcoded (since they have .new.01 attached to the file name). I can then select all and deselect the .new.01 files, to avoid retranscoding them. This of course is a hassle to manually select/deselect the files each time.

Doesn’t your approach end up with the same result? If I’m adding the already-transcoded files into the same bin with ALL of the files, then I can sort by name and see my original clip (say 20151102) and my transcoded clip (20151102.new.01). The trouble is I would still have to manually deselect all of the .new.01 files to avoid re-transcoding them.

[Luke Arndt]

Awesome, Glenn. Thank you so much for the detailed explanation! I think that might save me a lot of hassle down the road.