[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Neil,

LTO lifetime is around 16000 complete end to end passes of the tape.
There are a number of tracks so this equates to around 200 reads or writes of all the data on a tape.

So your pessimistic NAB vendor who was talking about reading or writing the entire tape twice a month would have a tape life of about 8 years. Which to me sounds very impressive, however I’m not sure what customer they have seen doing this !!

The use case we see is filling a tape once. It may take several write sessions to fill the tape, but this is only one complete write. That still leaves around 200 reads back of your entire data set.

So if you read back half the data every month the tape would last over 30 years.
More realistically you might read back the data a lot of times in the first 6 months while working on the project and then occasionally in the future.

Plus with LTFS it’s much easier to perform partial restores that don’t read back all the files, which means less end to end passes.

Archive software like our YoYottaID LTFS will monitor number of loads, and error rates, warning if they are high allowing you plenty of time to migrate the data.

A real world example is the Disneynature Monkey Kingdom movie that has just been released.
They shot for over 1000 days in Sri Lanka using Sony 4K cameras and produced 1PB of data.
The material was only stored on LTFS LTO5 tapes. Then they spent eight months back in the UK editing and grading the shots which were restored from the LTO tape.

You can read about the LTO workflow in this magazine.

https://issuu.com/sonyprofessional/docs/monkey_kingdom_issuu

Martin Greenwood
CTO
YoYotta.com

[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Enrique,

I think it’s in slot 2 which is a x1 slot and both your x4 slots have x1 cards installed.
So I would swap slot 2 with the card in slot 3 or slot 4.

Best,

Martin

CTO
YoYotta

[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Logan,

Using LTO and Linux on a G5 Mac does sound like a hardware and software challenge !

At the recent NAB we showed a free update to our YoYottaID LTFS software product that supports reading TAR from LTO tapes. This allows easy restore or migration to LTFS for older tapes. Your LTO5 drive would read LTO 3, 4 and 5 archives. The appropriate adaptor would allow you to interface any Mac to the LTO5 drive.

I will send you more details.

Best,

Martin Greenwood
CTO
YoYotta

[Martin Greenwood]

Thanks Lewis. We’re focused on the Mac, so we won’t be developing a Windows version. You could run YoYottaID LTFS on a mid range MacMini, this would give you a low cost ingest / backup system with dual Thunderbolt and four USB3 ports. Allowing easy connection of client/shuttle drives and sharing into NAS/SAN.
As mentioned the LTFS tapes created are cross platform. Compare this with hard drives where you can have HFS+, NTFS and EXT formats each of which may or may not be compatible with customers operating system.
Here you can see a summary of the pros/cons of each Apple Mac model for different purposes.

https://yoyotta.com/yoyotta/hardware.html

More of our customers are using LTFS for backup, deliverables and project interchange with their customers.

Martin

[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Lewis,

I would recommend using LTFS software rather than the Finder.
I’m biased because I develop YoYottaID LTFS, but you need it for these reasons…
Checksum verification of transfer.
Creation of two or more copies in parallel.
Both of the above are essential if you are about to delete the original files!
Translation of characters in file names and paths than aren’t valid in LTFS.
Spreadsheet, PDF and email reports confirming the backup.

Then there are many other things like queuing different jobs to tape, spanning large archives over multiple tapes, parsing of clip timecode, resolution and codec and storing this in a searchable database log.

The tapes created will still be readable on any system. Windows, Mac or Linux, with or without extra software.
Please get in touch if you have any other questions.

Best,

Martin Greenwood
CTO, YoYotta
martin@yoyotta.com

[Martin Greenwood]

As you have tested with two different archive apps it could be a faulty drive, to help troubleshoot you could download our app YoYottaID LTFS.
When run it will check that you have all the correct frameworks for LTFS and driver for mTape.
If anything is needed it will download and update to the latest versions.

https://yoyotta.com/help/demo.html

If you have the same problems, then please contact me and I can take a look at the Mac system log to troubleshoot.

Martin Greenwood
martin@yoyotta.com
CTO YoYotta

[Martin Greenwood]

Mercedes,

The external hard drive may be formatted as FAT16, FAT32 or HFS.
These older filesystems have a maximum file size of 2GB.
How large is the movie file?
If you reformat the external drive as HFS+ on a Mac or NTFS on Windows then you will be able to use larger file sizes.

Martin

CTO

YoYotta.com

[Martin Greenwood]

Hi Jamie,

First I would say that choosing the archive format is equally as important as the codec.
Using LTFS on LTO5 or LTO6 will create an accessible archive allowing easy restore of selected clips.

Then regarding codec, use the same one that you can work with efficiently now. Changing to another may or may not ease access in the future, but it will certainly slow down your current workflow and also the archiving and future retrieval as it will involve transcoding.

In your case definitely use ProRes, whilst not a open standard there are open source decoders and encoders.
Also there has been a large increase recently in the number of third party cameras and other hardware that are creating ProRes which is the best way of prolonging a format.

In summary use your current working format and in the future as new LTO or other archive formats become available then review the situation. Ensure that your chosen codec is still your current post format and if not then whilst consolidating your material to a new archive, transcode to this new codec.
This way whilst preserving your assets indefinitely, you always have easy access to it for repurposing.

My company YoYotta creates workflow and archival software for the Mac, but having seen the rise and fall of many formats over the years I think this answer is valid for anyone on any platform.

Best,

Martin Greenwood
CTO
YoYotta.com