[Tim Jones]

By creating a job defined to monitor a “watch Folder”, you can create a job that runs incrementals on a scheduled basis. One of our customers run their incremental job 3x a day – 10AM, 2PM and 7PM – and has one of their interns responsible for ingesting cards and setting a flag when something comes in. This way, if nothing comes in during a 5 hour period, the schedule skips that run. They also do appended backups of these incremental operations to make the most of their tapes.

Once you get a feel for how BRU works (caution, ‘thar be command line demons lurking…’ and you WILL get some on you), you can do so much more than what is set up by default in the BRU PE and BRU Server GUIs.

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

[Tim Jones]

Yes, the recipient of the tapes will need BRU, just like they would need any other software (including LTFS since it’s also a user install). But, the BRU demo is all that’s required to restore. In fact, if you’ve been using our 30 demo and the demo period is expired, you can still continue to restore with the expired demo.

As for spanning tapes and incrementals, BRU properly handles both. For incrementals, you do need to create a job definition so that there is something to compare against.

If you get into a situation with BRU that’s beyond simple manual perusal, open a ticket on our support site and the team will be happy to assist (I don’t want to turn the Cow into a BRU support forum 🙂 ).

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Bruce,

Great news on the ATTO HBA and the system.

I can’t speak to Preroll Post, but I would invite you to read this blog entry:

What’s the big deal with how an LTO (or other) tape is written?

Also, My answers to Bob Cole’s questions below the original blog post can help you understand what we’re (TOLIS Group and BRU) doing to insure your data is recoverable far into the future.

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

[Tim Jones]

Here’s a SWAG, but check to see if a DCIM or MOVIE folder (there may also be other types – check one of your F55 cards?) exists in the root level or in the folders of your external drive. I had a drive that got started by copying the folders from an SDXC card from a Canon T5i and because the DCIM folder was at the root level of the Thunderbolt drive, FCP X thought that it was a card.

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

[Tim Jones]

I can’t speak for others, but the National Institutes for Health and the Library of Congress (and a number of Military film teams) are using lossless MJ2 (Motion JPEG 2000) wrapped in MXF-OP1a format.

Since MXF is a standard supported and promoted by SMPTE (among many others), it is a safe bet to expect the format to be supported for a very long time.

Another option would be to use PNG or TIFF single frame formats. These export formats save each frame as a separate PNG or TIFF file (like a DXF, but without the additional software support requirement). The result is far more files to manage on a “clip per folder” basis, but you can piece the project back together in almost any editing software on any platform.

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

[Tim Jones]

Have you gone back to Cache-A on this? Tom may be able to provide more specific insight…

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Bruce,

As I mentioned before, be sure to update the device drivers on the system for the ATTO card that you get. I recommend downloading from https://www.attotech.com rather than using the one on the CD that comes with the card.

I look forward to your results.

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

[Tim Jones]

Alex,

If you really want performance, you’ll need to look into a true SAS solution rather than an eSATA or USB solution. Even though you’ve moved to multiple spindles, you’re still hampered in that you are moving the data over a single channel connection. By using true SAS connectivity (I prefer ATTO’s ExpressSAS family), you get the throughput over multiple channels. With a four drive array, this can mean the difference between 243MB/sec and 540MB/sec. A good barometer of your setup is Black Magic Design’s Disk Speed Test (available from the App Store for free)

One of my successful Adobe CC configurations consists of a Mac Pro 4,1 (16GB, 2GB Nvidia Quadro 4800), ATTO ExpressSAS H680, Sans Digital TRX4 SAS, 4 Seagate Constellation ES.3 2TB disks in RAID-0 (stripe) mode. I’ve installed my Adobe apps onto the RAID as well as assigned the cache and projects to the same volume. This configuration has been very stable and fast for both PP and AE for quite a while.

I invite you to check out my Blog discussion on disks and RAID if you haven’t already:

Disk I/O Speeds, RAID levels and Spindle Count

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

[Tim Jones]

Bob’s right about the Hackintosh questionability, but we have seen success with a few users. The only guidance is that you must retrieve and install the latest ATTO drivers from ATTOTECH.com (that applies to real Mac’s as well). For some reason, Apple’s default driver kext for the ATTO ExpressSAS cards in Mavericks is a very old version. By updating to at lease 3.20 for the R cards or 2.25 for the H cards, you should be OK so far as the ExpressSAS driver is concerned.

HTH,

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

[Tim Jones]

It’s possible that the file that you’re trying to restore depended on a resource fork or special Finder info. If so, Cache-A’s solution uses the Apple Double format and would have potentially included a file by the same name as your original file, but with a “._” prepended to it. For example:

My Film Clip A
._My Film Clip A

If that’s the case, you may need to specify both files and restore them to a non-Mac (i.e. Windows or Linux) filesystem and them mount them on your Mac using the SMB/CIFS or NFS sharing protocol so that the Apple Double format will be recognized.

Otherwise, I’m out of ideas.

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