Tim Jones
Forum Replies Created
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Okay, that I’ve never seen. What version are you using – older NovaBack or NovaBACKUP PC? Have you checked with Novastor for compatibility issues with Windows 10?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Hi Brent,
Tape drives are not disk drives and you will need to gain an understand of that to move forward. Nova Back is a utility designed to allow you to create backup jobs that they run to copy data from your normal disk devices to tape. You select what you want to backup in Nova Back and then Nova Back writes that data onto the tape. The restore is the opposite – you search the Nova Back catalogs for what you want to restore, tell Nova Back where to restore it, and then Nova Back will ask you to load the correct tape and then read the data from teh tape returning it to the destination location you specified.
Review the workflow for Nova Back to get a feel for how things work, but don’t expect the tape to appear on your desk as a disk does.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Good Choice! just be sure to install ATTO’s driver version 2.45 once you get things together.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
The most important piece of your list is the SAS card. Which brand and model are you getting?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
We have a couple of other shops doing something similar to what Neil suggests. One thing that matters if you’re using the SMB layer to mount the Windows system’s filesystem is to turn off required signing. You can do this on the Mac side with this defaults command in a terminal:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server.plist SigningRequired -bool false
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Hi Per,
We are definitely moving forward with both Linux and Windows versions of BRU Producer’s edition in the new year.
We continue to get more and more requests from both new and existing customers for Linux and Windows versions of BRU PE. Apparently, the level of “distrust” in Apple regarding OS X Server has grown dramatically over the last year and is driving a lot of existing Mac users onto these platforms. While we have always supported Windows systems as clients under our BRU Server environment, the user needed a Linux, OS X, Solaris, or FreeBSD server system for the actual tape / disk component.
Our biggest issue with Windows has been the user-level GUI layer communicating with an Administrator (local system) level back-end. A normal user cannot access tape devices and some filesystem functionality that we need. We’ve uncovered a mechanism that is allowing us to move forward with the implementation and will be releasing BRU PE for Windows after the first of the year.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
In that environment, you’re looking at larger particulates versus micro-particulates as the primary issue in storage. We have a similar environment in Arizona and we use simple SterLite and Rubbermaid storage containers for the 1,000s of tapes we store in our lab. Add skin, hair, and pet dander (we’re a dog-friendly office) to the normal particulates because of the traffic in our lab and it gets very dusty. The normal Sterlite containers along with the normal tape cases keep that stuff off of the tapes. We have QIC, DAT and DLT tapes that have been stored in this manner for 22 to 28 years and we can still read/restore every one of them.
The main considerations that you should keep in mind are the humidity and temperature differences when it’s time to restore data. In our case, the drives and tapes are in a same-state environment. However, if you are bringing tapes back in for restore from an environment where there is a 10º difference in temperature or 15% difference in humidity levels, we recommend that you allow the tape(s) to acclimatize to the restore environment for at least 8 hours – or overnight if possible.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not promoting that you should be careless with your tapes, but on the other hand they are not items that will spoil if they are not handled “just so”.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
[Tim Gerhard] “You’re saying that LTO7 on MAC’s and Linux are all having speed issues …”
Yes – IF you’re not using the HighPoint RocketRAID 4522 or RockstSTOR 6328 with their 1.8.11.1 firmware (and the 4.4.1 IOP driver on Mac).
Are you saying that you’re seeing 300MB/sec+ with the ATTO solutions? Interesting since ATTO can’t even get there. Even with specifically tuned data sets and I/O setups, we’re maxing out in the 220-230MB/sec range. Also, both we and ATTO are witnessing read checksum errors with the R680 specifically (I’ve updated my original post to remove that comment WRT the H680).
[Tim Gerhard] … is there a specific version level of MAC OS or Linux that you’re seeing a decrease in speed?
The version of OS X doesn’t matter – 10.9.5 through 10.12.1, nor does the Mac system type. For Linux, we’ve tested with kernel versions 2.6, 3.X, and 4.X (tape I/O is kernel-dependent, not distribution dependent). Under Windows, we’ve used Windows XP, Server 2008, Server 20012, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.
It’s not surprising that you’d not witnessed what we’re seeing if you’re only testing with LTFS-based tools. Since LTFS-based solutions such as the ones that you describe don’t manipulate the tape drive directly, they are only aware of issues if the tape layer reports them. Unfortunately, LTFS doesn’t provide the levels of reporting from the tape layer that would truly identify the problems that we are witnessing. They can only report absolute failures or “after the fact” failures based on any form of checksum sidecar that is created (MD5, SHA1, etc.). Because BRU is talking directly to the tape drive at the SCSI / IOP layer with no “middle-man”, we are always aware of the state of the drive through both sense request and Tape Alert calls on our command channel for both write and read operations.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
HI Bob,
While it’s true that recovery from a storage failure needs to occur as fast as possible, in the event of one client’s work and meeting their emergency needs, would you really be restoring a complete 60TB or more data, or just the data for that client’s project? Hopefully, your normal edit and storage workflow would keep your clients’ projects separated on your local storage. In that case, even if you were restoring 10TB of data from LTO-6 tapes, you only need to restore 3 or 4 tapes, not all 24.
While I can’t speak to other products, BRU PE and BRU Server will both only require the tapes that contain the specific data you’re looking to restore – we don’t need all 24 tapes to restore the data written onto 3-4 tapes. That’s 8-10 or so hours, not a full week. Even if you were copying the data from a backup disk array to a new working volume, it’s still going to take hours to copy the data disk to disk since you would most likely not want to work from your backup copies as live data.
Having disk-based backups for small-event situations (oops, I overwrite the RAW with the color-corrected clip), LTO tape is far more cost-effective than disk unless you are buying consumer storage products (there’s a reason that an EVO, GraniteSTOR, or NEXIS cost far more than a Buffalo NAS). Remember, once you’ve purchased your LTO-6 configuration, each LTO-6 tape costs less than $30 on average. Can you really purchase 2.5TB of enterprise grade disk for $30?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Are there no PCIe slots in the system (you don’t say what it is)? If there are, try a HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 and a 4 drive SAS enclosure. You could hit almost 500MB/sec if you can so that.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!