[Neil Sadwelkar]

Are you writing to tape as LTFS?
Are you doing drag and drop (or copy-paste) in Win Explorer?
Or do you use some software to write to tape?

Your signature says ‘FCP Editor’. So maybe you’re backing up Mac drives via a Windows machine?

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Jerzy,

Thanks for the tips.
I am downloading Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 and Veeam Agent for Windows 2.2.

I have a bunch of Macs and a couple of licences of Parallels as well as two old DVDs with Win 7. I hope to get through with this, (on a Mac) or else I’ll have to score an old Windows system with Win 7. I have a SAS LTO-6 tape drive and a SAS card, so I can read these LTO-4 NTBackup tapes. I had checked that earlier.

This is for clients of a post house that shut down a couple of months ago. They have scores, maybe even hundreds of LTO-4 tapes all written with NTBackup which are lying with clients. I hope to be able to restore these tapes for them and migrate them to newer LTO-7 or LTO-8 tapes eventually, if I can get their data on a hard disk somehow.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I researched this further and found some methods to read the .bkf files from a NTBackup tape on a Windows system.
But recent versions of Windows don’t have any tape interface options so there are hacks needed for that.

I do have an LTO-6 drive and that reads this LTO-4 tape with a NTBackup on it. I’ve confirmed that the tape was written at a facility that had used NTBackup in Win Server 2003 (or maybe Win2k) to write this tape.

Meanwhile, while researching if there was any way to simply read off the tape and restore the raw data to a drive, I came across this post from Tim (in response to a post I had made) a year ago detailing how Bru allows read from tape and restore to disk from the command line.

I’m wondering of this can help me extract the tape to a file or files on disk and then I can take that over to a Windows system and do the NTBackup restore from disk.

—quote—

Hi Neil,

That’s what the TOLIS Tape Tools parts which are included with your BRU PE license are for – the “taperead” tool specifically in this case. It will allow you to read raw data from any tape and output that data to a disk file (or pipe it into another tool like tar or cpio). The downside is that you do need to have a basic understanding of how the tape was originally written including the block size that was used when writing the tape since there is no mechanism to ask a tape how it was written – variable vs. fixed block, 512b, 1024b, or another block size, etc. – to be able to properly read the content. You then need to understand how the originating software containerized the data when writing it to the tape (e.g.: tar, cpio, pax, bru, mtf, etc.) so that you can do something with the raw information once it is read from the tape.

For instance, to read a tape created with a Cache-A unit in tar format, we know two things – the tape was written in ustar format and it was written with a -b 300 blocking factor (tar uses 512-byte blocks, so that’s 150KB). To read a segment from that tape, you would use a command like this:

taperead -b 150k -f ntape0 | tar -tvvf – -b 300

That reads the raw data on the tape and sends it out via taperead’s “stdout” channel and then pipes it into tar’s “stdin” channel and would show you a table of contents (file listing) for the current segment on the tape.

For other formats, you would use a similar syntax, adjusting the -b argument as required, and sending the output to a disk file using redirection (“>”) or to an app like tar using a pipe (“|”).

Tim
—-unquote—-

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The Surface Studio is basically a PC. So, while it can’t run FCP X, it can run Premiere Pro and Resolve. Neither of which (AFAIK) have support for this puck device.

The only application of this puck I can think of, is to be a jog shuttle wheel for going through clips or timelines. But anyone who has never worked on a linear tape editor will not be accustomed to such an interface.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I think for smaller groups they seem more expensive.
For instance, from a review at Larry Jordan’s site, a 24 TB Jellyfish with 4 GigE ports runs about $ 8,000.

At the Lumaforge site, Jellyfish Mobile is listed as ‘starts at $ 8,995’.

For $ 9000 one could get a 100 TB (usable) NAS, a 10 GigE switch, and 10 GigE adapters for 8 machines. and have a super fast edit cum compositing team.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Thanks Tim.
I was wondering if I make a disk backup using Bru-PE, can I take the resulting file (its named .bru?) and then write that to tape somehow?

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I have 10 licenses of Hedge for the past over a year. I have moved maybe 2 PB of Arriraw, Red, Panasonic Raw, Sony Raw, and numerous other files for about 20 feature films using Hedge. And their feature set goes on increasing. Now they support resume too.

The good part about Hedge is that, provided your source is fast enough, making 2 or even 3 copies simultaneously takes the same time as one copy. This is true for Arri raw, Panasonic Raw, Canon raw with Codex transfer stations. or even with CFast cards.
With SD cards don’t expect the same speed, however, unless you get a very fast card reader.

And Hedge verifies during copy, and keeps a log of all copies.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I think you’re comparing network data flow with electricity through wires or water through pipes.
It doesn’t work like that.

It is possible for, say, a storage, to ‘feed’ 10GigE to a 10GigE switch port (its not an input), and then provide 10GigE bandwidth to 10 machines all connected to the same switch via 10GigE cables to 10GigE ports (they aren’t outputs).

Network switches ‘distribute’ data in a complex way that optimises bandwidth. They don’t share data equally between ports.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I know the benefits of RAID 5 and RAID 6, but there is a specific use case for which I had put the question.

When shooting in remote places where magliners can’t be rolled to, and where we have a very frugal setup, we need to provide for fast but reasonably portable hard disks. For Alexa SXT/Pana Raw/Red Raw, using RAID0 is the only way to to realise drives that have capacity and speed. So we use G-Tech or LaCie. And we transfer to two of them as safety. Two RAID0 drives used in parallel (but not mirrored) were what I likened to ‘kinda, sorta’ RAID01.

Anyway, I got the answers. If life throws you a 4-bay, make a RAID5.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I find it interesting that each clip on Resolve’s edit page timeline could have a Fusion comp associated with it and which can be ‘called’ instantly just by switching to the Fusion page. So, the Resolve timeline is actually a ‘string-out’ or a sequential collection of Fusion node trees.

Besides, the Edit page of Resolve provides a basic track-based compositor for anyone wishing to composite with tracks.

So Resolve-Fusion seems to be the ‘convergence’ (not sure if its the right term) of tracks and nodes. And one can work in either, or both but within the same software.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India