[Tim Jones]

Just be aware that the Thunderbolt or USB layer speed doesn’t matter if you’re only using 1-2 spindles (drives) since each drive will be the bottleneck. You won’t see a real boost in performance unless you are using 5 or more disks or SSD units. Yes, 3 drives will get you close to 400MB/sec, but that’s still low in comparison to modern media needs.

We always recommend that you try to get a Black Magic Disk Speed Test or an AJA System Performance test report for your particular system and drive configuration to see if you’ll be satisfied with the item.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

The good news is that Autodesk uses tar for those system tapes. The big question there is simply the block size value.

One point of note – if you run into Quantum LTO-A tapes (the pre-cursor to Cache-A), those are a custom format and unless someone from Quantum’s old Seagate team can shed light on the container format, those are gone forever unless you can locate an LTO-3A or LTO-4A drive in the wild.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

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
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Lucas,

Sorry, I thought that I’d replied to this.

Yes, that’s the complete part number.

The kit comes with either BRU Producer’s Edition or BRU Server M&E Edition.

BRU PE “supports” LTFS in that we will format and mount LTFS tapes, or catalog tapes you’ve received from others to make them searchable within BRU PE’s restore environment, but we do not USE LTFS for actual backup/archival. LTFS is designed so that you don’t need extra software to copy files onto and off of tape, but it also lacks the features for management and reliability that using a format like BRU provides.

BRU Server does not support LTFS in any manner.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Sam,

If you’re witnessing physical tape hangs like that, it’s a very good idea to run HPE’s L&TT diagnostics on the drive to find out what the drive mechanism thinks happened.

In the case of BRU PE and dual jobs/doubler, you will need to be able to see the average throughput in the read side of your storage device. We recommend Black Magic Disk Speed Test as a good sample tool. There is also a way to run BRU’s engine from the command line and get an unadulterated number from your source drive:

Create a folder with 60-70GB of media data on the source drive (more is fine, but will just take longer).
Open a Terminal and run the following command substituting the path of your prepared folder for the place holder:

bru -cvvvf /dev/null -b 2m /Volumes/PlaceHolder/Folder | tail -1

The process will run with no output until it finishes. At the end of the run, you’ll see a line that looks like this:

bru: [I181] wrote 36295680 blocks (72591360 KBytes) on volume [1], 0:02:02, 595011 KB/sec

In my case, I could easily run 3 drives with enough overhead to keep them spinning. The rule of thumb is 1.2 times the rated native throughput, so each LTO-6 would consume ~190MB/sec to stream.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Lucas,

Our kit is complete – proper firmware and proper drivers. The problems that you are witnessing are so frustrating because we know that tape is a reliable mechanism for both backup and archival. Unfortunately, so many people run into what you’re seeing and write tape off as a non-starter.

Just to be a bit more clear on the issues that you witnessed – you will see this with LTFS. Many will argue this with me because they’ve had no problems – and to them I say fantastic, but we see these on all four platforms we test – Linux, Windows, OS X, and Solaris.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

To further Tim G’s answer – the ATTO cards work fine with LTO-6 and earlier drives.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

I believe that you’ve been communicating with the techs, but are you sure that these are BRU PE tapes and not BRU Server or BRU Workstation? The import rules are slightly different for those tape layouts. Have you reported the import tool not recognizing the media?

If you’re restoring the entire tape, the command line is very similar to a tar command:
cd /Volumes/Restore-to-Drive/
sudo /usr/local/bin/bru -xvvf ntape0 -b BLOCKSIZE -PA
Of course, replace BLOCKSIZE with the block size that was used to write the tape. You can determine that with the following terminal command:
tapectl rewind; tapectl header | bru -hf - ; tapectl rewind
Look for the line that reads “bufsize:”.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Force Quit
Right Click the App in Finder
CMD-I to get info

Additionally, could the BRU UI have been launched on a secondary screen the last time it successfully launched?

You can try removing the preferences file
[code]rm /Library/Application\ Support/BRU\ PE/etc/com.tolisgroup.bru-pe[/code]

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

To Allen and all –

Because of the level of added support required when dealing with customers and tape devices, HPT has decided to NOT provide the firmware and drivers that we worked on to resolve the issues with the RR 4522 and RS 6328. While TOLIS Group has them, we are only allowed to provide them with units purchased as part of TOLIS Group kits; this was not my call.

Therefore, if you’re looking at running LTO-6 or LTO-7 drives on a Mac platform, TOLIS Group is the only source for solutions that will work properly under all situations.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!