[Tim Jones]

I can’t speak for NeoFinder, but BRU PE’s catalogs are gzip compressed plain text, so it shouldn’t be difficult for a reasonably talented web team to create a Ruby or PHP script that would provide a searchable resource.

In fact, this is what’s so funny when people complain about BRU and open source. With the exception of the actual BRU archival container format, all of our data handling is fully documented and “open source” and designed specifically to allow others to interact with the catalogs and libraries of content data.

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

[Tim Jones]

No – that’s my conundrum. It was copied into the library during import as defined by the “Copy into library” setting. Both files are the real things.

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

[Tim Jones]

NeoFinder simply imports the BRU PE catalogs and lets you browse them like any other drive’s contents.

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

[Tim Jones]

You should actually look at this as two different processes using 2 different sets of tapes (tapesets).

1> Archive completed projects. These projects are placed / appended onto tapesets that will be stored for long term retention and recovery.

2> Backup working projects. These projects are dynamic and this is where performing a full followed by incremental jobs is your safety net.

Once a working project is completed and delivered, see step 1 :). You may then rotate the working project’s tapes back in for the next set of working project backups.

BTW – that applies to any process, not just BRU PE :).

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

[Tim Jones]

I won’t go so far as to say the SANlink is your problem here, but we really suspect that the SANlink is your problem here .. or it’s Ancient Aliens :). You really should be communicating with Promise instead of Exabyte / Tandberg / Overland about this.

Fibre Channel is NEVER a good choice for point to point tape drive connectivity and you are one of the lucky ones if your existing SANlink – LTO-5 has worked properly all of this time. You also just paid a handsome additional amount for your LTO-6 versus buying a SAS-based drive.

I would suggest that you examine the possibility of returning the FC drive and using that money to buy a proper Thunderbolt to SAS solution that will continue to work with future drive versions. ATTO and HighPoint both make Thunderbolt to SAS adapters that work wonderfully with all of the various SAS LTO drives available.

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

[Tim Jones]

[tim gallaher] “Do any of you have opinions about using the cloud as a primary archive?”

Simply put – not for my data.

The cloud is “okay” for data that you can afford to lose access to when the cloud provider folds or is hacked (DDoS on DropBox last week is an example). Also, for small data. Remember that even if you have 100Mb cable networking, that’s still only 10MB/sec, or 36GB/hr. If you have a T1, your speed is only 1.44Mb/sec or 51.8MB/hr. Performing Cloud-based saving of data beyond a 100GB or so is really a tough situation unless you’re talking about Amazon Glacier and a 10Gb pipeline.

If you do go that route, ask what the cloud vendor’s network downtime recovery policy is. Do they FedEx or courier disks/DVD’s with your data if you need to recover?

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

[Tim Jones]

You could also use the HighPoint Rocket RAID 2722 unit. It’s much less expensive than the ATTO, is usually more available in the international market, and works wonderfully for tape.

Since the BRU engine itself didn’t change (the part of the product that performs the actual tape I/O), I really believe that you’re looking at a drive issue.

You still couldn’t find the L&TT package on HP’s site using that search term I listed above?

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

[Tim Jones]

I’m one of those who promote Tape (not just LTO) for long term archival. I’ve been in the storage industry for more than 30 years and I have a stack of disks that suffered failures within one or two years and tapes that we still perform test restores from dating back to 1988.

You are correct that disk was previously marketed as a safe archival technology for many years – by guess who – the disk drive manufacturers. I’ve been a disk drive manufacturer engineer and product manager (Connor Peripherals) and even then I knew that disk was a technology that was prone to failure simply because of the densities and mechanical operations involved. Back in 1993, I was involved in the development of a new technology named “RAID”, we were making a box that contained 6 512MB 3.5″ disks and a 2GB DAT tape dive. When we presented the box to upper management, we were instructed to “remove the DAT tape drive because it implies that the new RAID technology is unreliable.” This was a very odd position since one side of Connor was promoting backup and archival solutions while the other was promoting disk storage. The marketing messages back then were already starting to contradict each other within the same company. It’s not that you can’t support both messages, just that the messages should be adjusted to allow for the pros and cons of both technologies.

I do agree that your use of 3 disk copies is very smart if you are planning to only use disk. However, if you are truly interested in long term retention (5 years+), you really should invest in a tape solution.

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

[Tim Jones]

We recommend NeoFinder (it will also maintain BRU PE Catalog info). You can get a copy from https://www.cdfinder.de.

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

[Tim Jones]

We recommend the HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID 2722 if you’re just using the tape, or the HighPoint RocketRAID 4522 or the ATTO Technologies R680 if you’re using hardware RAID on disk with the same card.

As to the buffer size, 128K is pushing the limits of the Areca and 64K is better, but you will notice a reduction in performance on the drives (80MB/sec down to around 65MB/sec). I don’t believe that this will resolve the capacity issue since you’ve had success to this point.

Since you’ve previously gotten the full rated capacity with your tapes, I’m again brought to an actual issue with the tape drive itself. You really should run a cleaning cartridge and also run the diagnostic test with the L&TT tool.

We have an article in our knowledgebase on how to run the diagnostics and pull the support ticket for the HP team is an issue is reported.

Here are the steps to run a drive assessment test with the “hp_ltt” tool.

https://support.bru.com/howto/ltt_drive_assessment_test.php

Here are the steps to perform the drive support ticket extraction:

https://support.bru.com/howto/ltt_ticket_extraction.php

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