[Tim Jones]

You’ll find that the command line ffmpeg does a very good and true job of converting M2TS files to most directly editable formats.

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

[Tim Jones]

I’ll just plant this seed – even with a Hospital’s broadband business connection, you need to think about transfer speeds versus your average file sizes. While online backup works for a home user’s collection of photos and documents, media brings new meaning to the term slow motion.

For example, for many folks, having a 10Gbit pipe sounds like a lot, but it’s really just around 1MByte per second. An average 720p video running 30 minutes will be in the neighborhood of 5GB (depending on compression, of course). That means that one video would take over 50 minutes to transfer to your offsite storage over the wire.

With that as a simple reference, examine your environment, output volume, and connection speeds. Does online backup still look attractive?

Of course, I’m a strong proponent of tape for long term storage, but at least another disk stored at your home or in a bank safe deposit box would probably be more reasonable than online – both in speeds of backup and restore.

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 correct.

A better answer may be the Sonnet Echo Express SEIIand add 2 of the 2722 HBAs. That keeps you down to one box on you desk and one Thunderbolt device in the device chain.

Either way works great, though.

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

[Tim Jones]

This type of question would fall under the realm of restore issues, so the team would answer it. You would get the canned “Expired Support” message at the top, but the guys are really good about following up on anything that could cause restore confusion.

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

[Tim Jones]

The Catalog information is fully documented in the BRU PE User’s Guide in Appendix B.

I would recommend opening a support ticket at https://support.bru.com and let the guys help you directly with this.

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

[Tim Jones]

Of course, more is always better, but you can save some money going with the 1TB Fusion drive internally, and then buying a setup like the Seagate Thunderbolt to SAS/SATA adapter with a 1TB SSD from another source. For instance, the Samsung EVO 840 1TB with the Seagate adapter from Amazon is around US$500.

Note (to all SSD users) – Apple has made more lockout changes on Yosemite with regards to drivers and you can no longer easily enable TRIM functions (allow the disk to manage unused blocks more efficiently) on 3rd party SSD drives. While this isn’t a serious performance hit for a normal access situation, it can introduce a problem in the long term for high-volume access like editing 4K.

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Bob,

Yes, the Areca adapter used in the mTape is fixed for tape (driver and firmware). We still can’t get Areca interested in doing this change for all of their PCIe HBAs though, so only ATTO and HighPoint are available for more general use.

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

[Tim Jones]

You didn’t expound on your statement about the damaged BRU tape (and continued to throw childish comments).

We’re looking at what you’re doing in the same manner in which you guys looked at BRU.

And, since you mentioned it, we’re looking at it because a customer created a series of LTFS tapes to send to another shop who was looking at PRP and LTFS. The second shop can’t import any of these LTFS tapes. We had our customer send us two of the tapes and it seems that PRP won’t import a tape that’s been written to multiple times. The error that both we and the original PRP user are getting is that PRP can’t import tapes with multiple indexes. Since every non-continguous write to an LTFS tape creates a new index, you guys should look at this issue. Currently, PRP will only catalog non-native LTFS tapes that have been written in a single atomic operation and have the index write rule set to on unmount. If the index update is set to time or the tape has multiple writes in separate session, you guys won’t parse it and simply toss up an error message that the end user doesn’t understand.

There’s nothing wrong with the tapes and the other shop’s user can mount them properly from the command line.

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

[Tim Jones]

[Dan Montgomery] “And do you really want to start comparing what BRU can do to your tapes? We damaged a tape just trying to use BRU! Those who live in glass houses…
“

And, there’s another cheap shot… Please, don’t allude to an issue and NOT describe what truly happened. If you have such a tape, I’d love to see it. What did you do to the tape using BRU? Please, since you’ve opened this gate, don’t perform a hit and run.

1) there’s is no way for software to “damage” a tape as you allude
2) the only thing that BRU might do to an LTFS tape is to overwrite the index on partition 0 making the LTFS tape unrecoverable (for others reading, we warn if you try to overwrite an LTFS tape).

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

[Tim Jones]

Dan, that’s a cheap shot (but I expect no less) and I’m sorry that you have a Don Quixote complex, but the proof is in the tasting of the pudding.

Insert and format an LTFS tape
Mount it
Start copying 300GB to it
Half way through, turn off the tape drive
Wait while Finder goes a bit wonky trying to warn you that the disk was improperly ejected
Turn the tape drive back on
Try to mount the LTFS volume
Ta Da – no windmill, just a failed tape.
Run “ltfsck –deep” and wait a few hours and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get access to some of the files written to the tape.

Insert a blank tape
Start a BRU backup of the same 300GB
Half way through, turn off the tape drive.
Restart tape drive
Insert that tape
Restore every file up to the point of the power off

Otherwise, if LTFS was so good why does it need the many recovery mechanisms that you describe?

Dan wrote: “The next option is named Deep Recovery and it’s commonly needed when the tape is improperly ejected, power lost during the write process, etc. It should only be used if the Full Recovery is unsuccessful because this process can take hours to complete. ”

and then: The last option is Read Only Mount. It’s the last resort and generally only needed in cases of actual physical damage to the tape or it’s memory, etc.

Any of these recovery options should never be interrupted once started. Otherwise you run the risk of the tape becoming permanently unmountable.

You’ll never find any such warnings and caveats with a BRU-based archive.

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