[Tim Jones]

The good news here is that aside from the physical look of the system, the management and operation stay the same.

If you haven’t looked into that Kepler upgrade for your existing Mac Pro 4,1 units, I think that you will be very surprised at how much life these systems still have in them (much to Apple’s disappointment, I’m sure 🙂 ).

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Eric,

Were you able to get this sorted out?

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

[Tim Jones]

Only one “gotcha” in that list – No current CC GPU acceleration support in the new MP.

I have both my new Mac Pro and my older Mac Pro 4,1 running Adobe’s CC apps and while I love the new beauty, I still get better performance in PP/AE CC on the 4,1.

Honestly, I would recommend that you buy one of these beasts, get it sorted and set up and then compare it to your existing systems. No one can tell you what will work best for your environment better than a hands-on example; you know, “the proof is in the tasting of the pudding.”

It may be that the best step that you could take would be upgrading the graphics card in your 4,1’s to a newer Nvidia Kepler-based K5000 instead of going the whole nine yards with the new MP’s.

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

[Tim Jones]

Todd,

If you’re seeing the drive on that HBA in the earlier version of OS X, then it is definitely an issue with the ATTO driver installed in 10.9. Please double check that you have downloaded and installed the version of the ATTO R680 driver with version 3.25 from https://www.attotech.com.

The earlier drivers only support disk on 10.9 because of some Apple changes.

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Todd,

Yes – if the drive does not show up under System Profiler -> SAS Devices, BRU PE can never see it (true for all software). If the system doesn’t see the drive, you’re at a full stop.

Also, if you run the ATTO Config Tool, do you see the drive on one of the channel pages?

As for tutorials, we’d be happy to host a Webex session for you to give you a broader view of the processes and workflow.

Also, some videos examining the new elements are being recorded.

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

[Tim Jones]

If you’re not looking to expand in capacity, I wouldn’t change your configuration except to maybe add a second USB/FW drive as a backup volume. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

The only potential issue that I could see is in that if you start working with 2K or 4K input, you may find yourself hampered by the FW drive.

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Eric,

I’ll save you some time and money – you can’t use tape with the Areca or Highpoint SAS cards. You MUST use an ATTO card.

BTW – we urge you to use either HP or Fujifilm branded LTO media for best results and longest drive life.

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

[Tim Jones]

Be sure to install the latest ATTO R680 drivers. The versions included with OS X 10.9 is a downgraded version.

There are no tape drivers for OS X, all of the logic is built into BRU itself.

Don’t forget, you can always get through to our support team at 480-505-1814 or by opening a ticket at https://support.bru.com

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

[Tim Jones]

I did have some additional feedback about the points that you posted about disadvantages of using BRU:

[Raul Zeummes] “I’d be keeping my files in a proprietary format. There’s only this one company that’s responsible for it, and who knows where they’ll be in 30 years.

Two things are in place to sort this as I’ve described in this blog post: Dealing with BRU’s Proprietary Nature

You can’t backup to a tape and a disk in one operation. (which you can in PRP) If they did add this functionality I would assume the files would be in bru format on the disk, which seems undesirable.

We did this because we don’t see a win in duplicating the functionality that your operating system already provides. You want to simply copy files from your media to your disk? Drag and Drop. Works in Finder, Explorer, and the various media managers on Linux.

As mentioned in my answer to your scenario earlier, if you’re more interested tin validating the copies, then BRU PE provides a proven mechanism for insuring that both the copy of the files written to your tape and the copy then written to your disk. In each operation, the files are checksummed via an inline process based on a 2K level of granularity. This is more consuming that a simple copy, but it does provide inline checksumming that requires no additional intervention on the users’ part.

On the other hand, manually copying is only as good as the underlying copy tool and I’d rather trust the OS’ tool than a 3rd party tool other wise.

The interface is much less straightforward, even confusing at times. Why does it say LTO5 everywhere when I’m using LTO6 ?

I’m curious about this statement. The only way that this would be happening is if you were running the 2.3 version of BRU PE that was released before LTO-6 was available. In the 3.x builds, we refer to the drive by it’s reported type regardless of whether it’s LTO-1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6.

Many comments on the web about BRU being frustrating to use.

My suspicion is that if you read those comments to the end of the threads, you’ll see that in almost each instance the issue was a problem with the drive or a misunderstanding of how tape access works.

I would be curious about your feelings on these notes after you’ve had a chance to read our “what if…” stance and you’ve had a chance to work with the latest version of the app.

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

[Tim Jones]

As always – my pleasure.

Here’s what a couple of road warriors are doing in your situation:

Mount the camera cards on the Mac (no need to copy them first)
Back the card contents up to LTO tape with BRU PE
Restore the backed up data from the LTO tape to the local disk using BRU PE’s “Restore to Alternate Location” option
Lather, rinse, repeat…

Because BRU is checksumming the data from the cards onto the LTO tape, you are sure that you have a correct original copy. Because BRU then also verifies the checksums on the restore pass, you are sure that you have a correct copy written to the local disk.

After a few “reassurance runs”, most users simply returned the cards to use as soon as the BRU backup to tape is completed since they know that the copy is 100%.

HTH,

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