[Neil Sadwelkar]

Ray, you’re right about the latest MacBook Pro (late 2016) having Thunderbolt 3. It does, and the same port doubles up as USB-C and power. Its on back order at the Apple Store and the estimated shipping is 4-5 weeks now.
The basic config runs $ 2,800. The maxed out MacBook Pro will run $ 3,500. (2.9GHz quad Core i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Radeon Pro 460 GPU 4GB, 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports)

And yes, the Pegasus3 is Thunderbolt 3 and will work with this new MacBook Pro. Even the older Pegasus2 with Thunderbolt 2 will work fine with the new MacBook Pro (with a Thunderbolt3 to Thunderbolt2 adapter now $29)
AFAIK, if you attach the new MacBook Pro to this new Thunderbolt 3 Pegasus, it will also charge your MacBook Pro.

For an external TB3 monitor, LG is shipping the 4k ultra fine display at a new reduced price of $ 524. Connecting the MacBook pro to this monitor gives you two USB-C ports and presumably also charges the MBP.
To the extra ports (USB-C) on the monitor, you can connect other USB-C devices or older USB3/2 devices (drives, keyboards, mice) with a USB-C-USB3 adapter which now costs $ 9.

Going forward, it appears certain that the new iMac and new MacPro, and maybe even the new Mac mini, whenever they ship, will also have Thunderbolt3/USB-C ports, so your TB3 Pegasus will be compatible with them. And, like Bob said, many vendors will come out with Thunderbolt3 and USB-C RAIDs and drives. For the first time we will have an ultra fast port (like way twice USB3’s 5 Gbps) which will be common in Mac and PC systems. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 weren’t very common on PCs so few vendors introduced Thunderbolt RAIDs.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The original post referred to doing backups of “archiving our library of hard drives from the past 10 years”. So I guessed these are single external hard drives. 10 years old means some would be even 80 and 120 GB drives. Windows or Mac doesn’t matter, the Mac system running Bru would happily read those.

I had a client with a closet full of old drives. They were ranging from 40GB to 500GB. Some drives mount some don’t. Others had errors so some files couldn’t get copied.

I just took a 9TB RAID over and had an assistant copy them all to the RAID. Then I backed up with Bru from the RAID.
So, copying several small capacity drives to newer drive first ironed out these issues. Else Bru would have kept halting for each disk error. Besides, how does one connect 8 USB2 drives of 120 GB each to a system at once. So doing this backup drive by drive would mean many appended sessions.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

If it helps any, here’s what I have, for one of my Bru setups.

A MacBook Air 11″, a TBolt-PCI adapter with an SAS card, and a Tandberg external LTO-6 tape drive.
The MacBook Air makes this system very portable and lightweight. And, it’s cross platform so I can backup Windows and Mac drives. All of this fits in a backpack.

So, even if you’re an otherwise Windows shop, you could consider getting a low cost Mac just for Bru backups. Even a Mac mini will do. Besides, your ‘archive PC’ (which is a mac) will be relatively free of viruses and malware.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

While a project is ongoing, then of course, a disk based storage (or RAID) is inevitable. But some projects remain semi-ongoing over long periods of time. There, a near-line storage is preferable to LTO backup, as project media on drives is easier to bring back to rework on.

About the NAS solutions you’ve mentioned, my issue with them is that the core storage within a NAS remains at the mercy of the ‘server’, which is a casing with some kind of a Linux based server built in.
Should that box fail, the data on the drives is inaccessible unless you get another one of the exact same box. So, instead of a 8-bay Thunderbolt QNAP, I prefer a G-Tech 8-bay Thunderbolt RAID connected to a MacPro, or even a Mac mini plugged into a switch over 10GigE.

The RAID connected to a Mac is then shared and the Mac is a ‘server’. In case the ‘server’ fails, the storage itself is accessible over any other Mac or PC.

For projects that I handle I make a backup to LTO of all shoot ‘footage’ as the shoot progresses. And after the edit is locked, we back up consolidated footage to fewer LTOs. Sometimes just one or two LTO-6 can hold the entire used footage. Bringing that back is just hours away in the event of storage failure. We use Bru-PE for footage backup, and like Tim mentioned, we don’t need the entire lot of LTOs to restore just a few files.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

10 GigE is theoretically 10 Gbps, so its theoretically 2 times faster than USB 3.0 which is 5 Gbps.
In practice, transfer speeds over 10GigE would depend on the drive/RAID speed, network overhead, and connection protocol.

Based on my observations on connecting a 10GigE host (Sony SRPC-4 with a Sony camera data pack) to a MBP with a 10GigE adapter and writing to an external Thunderbolt RAID capable of 800 MB/sec, I got speeds of up to 400 MB/sec. Others have reported speeds up to 500 MB/sec.

This is over SMB, so there’s some network overhead too. Maybe some other protocol with less overhead may work faster.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I use DaVinci Resolve to transcode. When transcoding ArriRaw and RedRaw, we set the project to use Reel name embedded in the file. When transcoding other camera clips which lack an embedded Reel Name, we set those clips (via Clip Attributes) to set the file name as Reel name.
But I think there’s a way to add Reel name from folder names in DaVinci Resolve.

But I agree, Sony needs to work on this particularly with XAVC-S cameras. Reel Name (or Tape name) is a relic from the tape era, but its an important factor in parsing clips with same names. Very crucial in the Digital file world.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

My thoughts exactly.

I used to do credits using the Photoshop-AE method twenty years ago. So recently I offered to do end credits for a full length feature thinking, how hard can it be. There must be a software or plug-in I can buy and pronto. Since I had access to an Avid I thought I’d try NewBlue Titler Pro that’s free with an Avid subscription. The demo videos show it all as possible and in real time.
But for a feature film scroll with hundreds of lines, I kept getting a beach-ball for every change. Even a small typo fix gave a beach ball for a few minutes at a time.

So, I went back to the Photoshop-AE method.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Two different setups…

Joe Bender
Quantum LTO-7 rack mount, SAS HighPoint RocketStor 6328, 6-core late 2013 Mac Pro, 64GB RAM, OSX 10.11.4.
Source: 12-bay rackmount RAID over 10GbE, read speeds 900MB/s range.

Jeff Lehman
mLogic Thunderbolt LTO-7 drive, PreRollPost for Mac
Source: G-SPEED Studio XL

Hardware spec totally different. Common software PreRoll Post among others.

I own PreRoll Post, as well as Bru-PE. Use Bru-PE almost always. PreRoll Post, tried ran into similar issues, gave up.

My setup
Tandberg LTO-6 connected via SAS to a Atto H680 SAS card inside a Sonnet PCIe expander.
Use MacBook Pro/Mac mini/MacBook Air and Bru-PE MacOSX is 10.10 and 10.9.

Not one single backup failure in 4 years. Barring mains outages where even the UPS ran out.

Here are my thoughts.

Joe, I think your GigE card and/or SAS card is suspect. Is the SAS card recommended by the LTO drive maker? Have you tried backing up to LTO via some other drive not the NAS RAID.

Jeff, you too, Have you tried backing up to LTO via some other drive not the G-SPEED Studio XL.

And for both, have you tried backing up with Bru-PE? Its free for 30 days so you can try. If it backs up successfully, then your entire hardwares setup is doing just fine.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The G-dock is a dock that accepts only G-Tech G-Drive ev drives. these are internally 1.5″ drives of 500 GB or 1 TB capacity. So not as fast as 3.5″ drives. The dock that you linked to (of which I too have several) accepts bare SATA drives which can be even 8Tb each. Of course, bare SATA drives aren’t as robust as encased G-Drive ev drives.

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

[Neil Sadwelkar]

[Luke Ogden] “a cheap StarTech Dual SATA Hard Drive Enclosure “

The link is incorrect. The correct one is…
https://www.startech.com/uk/HDD/Enclosures/Dual-35in-USB-3-Hot-Swap-Trayless-SATA-Hard-Drive-Enclosure-with-Fan~SAT3520U3R

Your method is not safe. Setting the drives as JBOD and copying to both simultaneously using a copy utility like Hedge, or copying to one and using Chronosync to sync the other is safer.

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