Neil Sadwelkar
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It’s been a month since you posted. Did you find a solution?
Some thoughts, in case you’re still looking for answers.
Like Martin said, the LTO drive seems to be bust and will need replacement.
LTO-6 tapes can be read only in an LTO-6 or a LTO-7 tape drive. So you need to buy one or the other. Chances are, they might even be costing nearly the same. Since you’re near the UK, you could take a look at Symply LTO drives. They are Thunderbolt drives so you won’t need all the SAS adapters in between.
Your tapes are written with Pre-Roll Post so they are LTFS. It’s been a while since I used pre-Roll Post, but my guess is that tapes written with PRP can be read by mounting them with YoYotta or Canister. And, once mounted with YoYotta, you can ‘index’ the tapes using either DiskCatalogMaker or NeoFinder. Or, you could even store their contents in the YoYotta internal database.
It’s a tedious process, inserting the tape, mounting it, and then scanning it and repeating that for 300 tapes. At 5 mins per tape you should be done in 3 working days.
About the longevity of the LTO tapes, chances are you’ll be able to access the data on them only as long as you have a compatible LTO drive. For eg. LTO-2 tape written in, say, 2004 can still be read but getting a LTO-2 or LTO-3 or LTO-4 drive is quite challenging in 2025. And if you do find one, keeping it working indefinitely is also non-trivial.
That will be the outcome of your LTO-6 tapes about 10 years, or maybe even 5 from now. So, migrating LTO-6 tapes to a generation higher, every 5 or so years, is the only way to keep the data accessible.
Currently, LTO-8 is stable and cost-effective. LTO-9 has a higher failure rate. And is expensive. 5-6 LTO-6 tapes can fit inside one LTO-8 tape. But, for this ‘migration’ you’ll need one LTO-6 or 7 drive, a reasonable amount of hard disk space to offload the LTO-6 tapes temporarily, and then one LTO-8 drive to write the data to LTO-8 tapes. 300 LTO-6 tapes will shrink into about 50-60 LTO-8 tapes.
I’ve done this migration for some media companies. Some even remotely. If you need help and handholding, write to me at neil *at* digitaldada *dot* in.
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If you can’t get any help from the link, you can send them to me. I have an old system that I’m keeping just for these occasions.
Mail me at
neil at digitaldada dot in
Neil
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From the last modified date of these libraries you could guess the version of FCP X that these were saved to. Versions of FCP X by date released, are listed in the Wikipedia page for ‘Final Cut Pro’. Scroll to the bottom to see the table with versions and release dates.
For eg. if the Library was last modified in 2016, then its likely to be FCP X 10.3 or earlier.
To get FCP 10.3 you’ll have to find an old Mac with MacOS 10.12 installed. In that Mac, you can login with your App Store credentials and in the App Store go to ‘Purchased’ to find your purchase of FCP X. In that system, since its still on MacOS 10.12, the App Store should offer you FCP x 10.3 of 10.4 for download.
If this works and you get FCP X 10.4, the you should be able to open a 10.4 or earlier Library. It may ask to update in case the Library is even older.
But you may not even need to go so far back. You could can start with the previous version of FCP X, that is FCP X 10.7 or 10.6 which will be available on an older Mac Intel system. 10.7 or 10.6 may be able to open many older 10.x version libraries. So, you may need to open and upgrade these libraries in successively newer FCP versions and upgrade them in stages till 10.6 or 10.7. Once you reach there, then the latest FCP should be able to upgrade them.
This looks to be a long and tedious run.
Neil Sadwelkar
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I don’t have experience with this specific NAS, but I’ve deployed 5 systems on a QNAP NAS, with 3 on 10GigE and 2 on 1 GigE. My systems are Prem Pro and Avid, and one Prem Pro is on 10GigE, the other 1 GigE. These are used for feature and series edits. All the media is either DNxHD 36 for Avid, or Apple ProRes LT or Proxy for Prem Pro. All either 1080p24 or 1080p25. (24 is 24.000, not 23.976, as we are in a PAL country). No raw files, no 4k files.
What I’ve done with the Prem Pro systems, is, to provide each of them with a 2TB USB SSD and set that as preview and cache from within Prem Pro. So that at project open time, the system doesn’t read from NAS for media and write back for cache/preview to NAS. This is one thing you could consider. Preventing large number of simultaneous read-writes to NAS over 1 GigE.
Also, our project files are not stored on NAS, but locally and then backed up to the NAS every night.
Second, if at all possible, as a trial, transfer some or all of the the slow-to-open media from NAS, to a fast hard drive RAID or SSD, then, after reconnecting to that media in PPro, unmount the NAS, and check if project open is faster. With media local.
Basically, by the process of elimination you will need to ascertain whether, your system is slow (probably not), or is the NAS throughput and latency not adequate, or is 1 GigE not high bandwidth enough. Or is there some other issue.
Neil
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Santanu,
Ever growing archives of media, is an issue facing any content creator. 70TB is what a feature or series generates in about 40 days of shoot, so it’s not a huge amount in today’s standards.
The most common method of archive is backup to LTO. I do a lot of this. Like over a petabyte in a year. Every year since the past 7+ years. Like almost any ‘on-prem’ archive, this one is not a ‘forever archive’. LTO tapes change generations every couple of years, and while backward compatibility is assured within about 1-2 generations, after about 10 years, one needs to ‘migrate’ entire LTO tape archives to the current generation. For example, I’m migrating large collections of LTO-5 and 6 tapes created in the 2012-15 period, to LTO-8 and LTO-9 tapes now. 10 years from now, they’ll need to migrate again.
If archives are stored on hard drives, those too have a life, and even hard drive based archives need to be migrated to the current largest capacity drives. I’ve migrated many 2-4TB drives from 2009-2012 to 8-12TB drives around 2017-2020. Some of the original 2-4TB drives still work, some don’t. But the dupes made in 2017-2020 are still readable, but not for long. So, I’ll need to migrate them once again, next year.
A convenient aspect of migrating is that hard drive prices halve every 2-4 years, and capacity also doubles in about that time. So also, LTO generations. Each LTR generation stores 1.5x-2x of the previous generation.
Cloud archive has a monthly cost which varies depending on which platform one chooses. People who archived to the cloud in the 2018 or before, have now paid for about 5+ years. And they continue to pay huge sums of money to keep this data in the cloud. The amount of data they have in the cloud is so huge now that taking it back is impractical, due to the time, and egress costs. So, most likely, some will keep their local copy and delete the cloud backup eventually.
I get many queries from people paying hundreds of thousands of $ per annum just to keep their data in the cloud. They ask, can we not own a setup and keep this ourselves, maybe in another premises in some other part of the city or some other city. This is the new ‘private cloud’, which I’m devising for some of my clients. With the advantage that if any data was needed, all one has to do is connect a drive and copy it. No egress time, no egress charges.
Neil
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Are you sure the Bru-PE version is 18.1.1? As far as I remember the last version was 3.x
In general, Bru-PE could import archives from older versions, but not from newer ones. Maybe the tape is from an Argest setup? Arrest is the successor of Bru-PE.
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The recent spate of failures were with Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB version.
Samsung 3TB I haven’t heard of such a drive. There’s 2TB and there’s 4TB. But I haven’t come across reports of Samsung 2TB or 4TB drives failing.
In early 2023, there were reports of the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD having failures but there was a firmware fix that Samsung issued which seemed to fix the problem.
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There are many SSDs on the market now. But only a few are suited for video post.
Almost all SSDs are faster than hard drives as far as reading data is concerned. But not many SSDs are fast for writing large amounts of data. Most SSDs write data very fast up to about 50-100 GB and then slow down to less then hard drive speeds. This is a on board RAM/Cache thing in the SSD. But there are also SSDs which write even 800GB to several TB, very fast.
Also, the new M1/M2/M3 series Macs are somehow slower for reading/writing to USB SSDs as compared to the same USB SSD with an older Intel Mac. Thunderbolt SSDs work fine on M1/M2/M3 Macs. Or, connecting USB SSDs via a Thunderbolt 4 hub seems to improve their speed on an M1 Mac.
From experience, Samsung Shield 4TB works very well on M1 Macs. Use the cable that came with the SSD. With Macs using a wrong cable will give you USB 2.0 speeds on SSDs. Maybe that’s what’s happening in the screenshot you uploaded (maybe, it could also be a bad SSD).
But what’s really worked for me is to get OWC Envoy express or Sabrent Thunderbolt SSD enclosures and placing an NVMe SSD inside it. That’s seriously fast and can actually speed up your renders.
WD Black, Samsung 980/990 Pro, Samsung 970 Evo Plus, Crucial P5 Plus, are NVMe SSD models that I’ve found are very fast (inside the above enclosures) even for sustained writes and reads. I’ve used mine extensively with DaVinci Resolve Studio, so I’m sure they’ll work fine for FCP.
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‘X’ marks just the clip that your cursor is parked at.
Neil
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I had this issue many years ago. But that was with just a handful of tapes. I had written to Imagine then, and they sent a new build which helped me retrieve those tapes.
But it was too scary. So, after retrieving the tapes I switched to YoYotta and more recently to Canister and their backups are more reliable.
Neil