[Tim Jones]

Hi Doug,

The price I mentioned was based on the number that one of our customers was quoted. It included a 2U Library and LTO-6. But as you mention, what your products provide is far and beyond the free LTFS that is open source. This is the point that I’m trying to get across in this discussion. LTFS does NOT bring all of that needed functionality to the game, the companies that provide the wrappers around LTFS such as both StorageDNA and Image Products do.

And, to the best of my knowledge, neither StorageDNA, Crossroads, Cache-A nor PreRoll Post products are open source. Thus my point that the discussion of “proprietary” totally depends on which part of the solution that you are looking at.

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

[Tim Jones]

How about:

Duplicate the project
Remove the Menu track
Export

Discard the duplicated project

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

[Tim Jones]

Hi Tangier –

Have you looked at NeoFinder? It’s quite the amazing little addition to your file management toolbox:

NeoFinder

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

[Tim Jones]

As for future use, the new Mac Pro’s don’t have any place for you to use the drive that you buy short of buying an external TB or USB chassis, so the 6Gb drives really don’t help now or in the future.

If you’re not adamant about OWC and it’s the warranty that you’re worried about, I’d recommend the Samsung EVO 840 series:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-EVO-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TE250BW/dp/B00E3W1726

250GB, $169, 5 year warranty. Be sure to scroll down that page to the comparison chart.

The only reason to go with the PCIe card-based solutions would be to overcome the performance limitation of the Mac Pro’s SATA II interface.

As to reliability, SSDs of today have a MUCH larger write / read cycle rating over SSDs from just 2 years ago. An average current SSD will actually provide a longer useful life than commodity desktop spinning disks. Our lab tests show them to be as resilient as the much more expensive enterprise grade spinning drives.

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

[Tim Jones]

Sam –

Sorry to have turned this into such a hornet’s nest :).

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

[Tim Jones]

To others – I apologize ahead of time for this, but I can’t sit back while such a hit and run is posted. If you’re not interested in the deep facts that are being discussed, it’s probably best to ignore this posting.

[Dan Montgomery] “Thanks Tim for reminding me why I don’t normally post in forums (and won’t comment beyond this).”

So, because someone disagrees with you and points out invalid statements in your claims you shut down the discourse. Ignoring something is definitely one way to make it go away.

Nothing that I have presented is false or non-attributable. In fact, our LTFS Caveats document has stood the test of time for more than three years with a standing offer to update or even remove it if even one of the claims made can be truly refuted.

As for published articles, anyone with enough money can get an article published that promotes the topic of the vendor in question. We have been offered many so called “editorial opportunities” by pubs and sites if we were willing to purchase large ad blocks – it’s just the way that things work. Of course, the Xendata folks would make such a statement because they, like you, depend on LTFS to access any type of tape device. If neither of you had LTFS, where would you be from a tape standpoint? Our BRU products support both BRU format AND LTFS and we provide tools that make it possible to read and write tar and cpio tapes on OS X as well as reading MTF/MTIO tapes from the Windows realm on OS X.

Next, you don’t MOUNT our tape drive as tapes shouldn’t be mounted – tape is not disk. The ATTO drivers are included in OS X and Windows out of the box. While it’s a good idea to update to their latest versions, it’s not required and the drivers from the HBA manufacturers don’t change the format that is written to the tape itself. And, the LTFS layer STILL depends on those same ATTO (or other) device drivers for proper operation. Unlike updating an HBA driver, changing an LTFS driver can mean the difference between a drive working or not working. It can also mean the difference between an old LTFS tape being readable under the new drivers or not.

Additionally, BRU supports far more vendors’ tape devices than LTFS. LTO-1 through LTO-6, DDS-1 through DAT320, AIT, SAIT, DLT, SDLT, T10000A through D, and even antiquated QIC and Pertec devices, Additionaly, we support cloud storage standards such as SFTP and WebDAV in addition to local disk and even optical media. And, the archival container format is the same across ALL of these device infrastructures, so you could backup to a disk and transfer the archive directly to a tape and BRU can restore the contents with no further work on your part. You can then readily copy the contents of an LTO-4 tape to an LTO-8 tape in 2020 and BRU would still be quite happy restoring the data from the new technology.

Finally. while you were at Discovery, did you ask specifically about LTFS failure rates? Not the Discovery specific format issues, but the failure rates of mounting volumes at all? I’m sure that they wouldn’t simply volunteer such data without specific probing.

I’m sorry to be so verbal about all of this, but so many vendors have jumped on the LTFS bandwagon without truly understanding what’s “behind the curtain” that I can’t just sit by and let them all poo-poo BRU with our success rate and 29 years of proven reliability when they really don’t have a true, device level understanding of how this all works. My team does know what’s in LTFS and have even made code-level patch submissions to the project.

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

[Tim Jones]

I would recommend option 1 over 2 and 3 unless you have a slot for option 4 as the Mac Pro’s internal SATA is only SATA II and therefore limited to 3Gb/sec. The Excelsior is a direct PCIe implementation and really screams compare to the generic SATA SSDs.

Other options for the PCIe drive include Sonnet’s Tempo line. The SSD Pro allows you to add 2 SSD drives into one slot with the standard support 1 drive. Either offers far better performance that the normal Mac Pro SATA backplane.

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

[Tim Jones]

Let me start by saying that I agree that PreRoll Post has brought a lot of goodness to the LTFS format for a far more reasonable price than other solutions. However, PRP is NOT the LTFS format. And, PRP’s ability to write to tape is at the whim of the engineers writing the LTFS specification unless you spin off your own code tree that your team controls. But then, you’re adding to the already existing 21 known LTFS implementations currently in the wild.

[Dan Montgomery] “Let me be clear, you can damage any tape by power off during a write session–Not during a Read.

Dan – that is not true. You can’t damage the tape through a power loss event. With BRU’s format (or tar or cpio for that matter), powering off the tape drive does not affect any of the data that has been written onto the tape up to the point of the failure. And even with the –deep-recovery option to LTFSCK, you still run into far more unrecoverable tapes than you should – this is a weakness related to the dual partition nature of the format.

[Dan Montgomery] “LTFS also is improving. It also has built-in self healing by reading bytes after they’re written and automatically re-writing them if need be.”

This statement is misleading and I’m not sure what LTFS code you’re looking at, but LTFS’ read after write verification is totally dependent on the tape drive’s algorithms, not something special in LTFS. Any software that writes to a tape device has gotten this functionality for free as far back as the QIC drives of the 1980s – it’s not an LTFS thing and has no relationship to LTFS. However, this functionality is highly affected by the GIGO effect – Garbage In, Garbage Out – in that the drive is only able to compare the data that it received in it’s input buffers. We have a white paper that describes the way this works on our site: Reliable Tape-based Verification. To perform software controlled Read After Write verification as you imply would slow the format’s write speed dramatically.

[Dan Montgomery] “There’s also a Discovery Tape Verifier feature, so you can check your tapes against Discovery’s rules before delivering–regardless of how you make the tape–.”

The problems related in my discussion were not in the formatting of the data in the strict Discovery layout, but rather that inability of the tapes to be read at all. This is an LTFS theme that continues to crop up time and again – the LTFS tape that you created today, can’t be mounted and read next week.

Additionally, we’ve (the tape industry members including Exabyte, Archive, HP, and a few no longer existing firms) demonstrated at public shows such as COMDEX, CeBIT, IBC and InterOp (plus many smaller regional shows) that modern tape media is much more resilient than nay-sayers promote. We froze tapes, soaked them in coffee, and even went so far as passing consumer-grade magnets over them and were still quite able to restore the data that existed on them after drying and warming the media to normal operating temperatures and humidity levels. So while I definitely agree that two copies at different locations is better than one copy in a desk drawer, the concern over getting an LTO tape wet and losing data is not a valid scenario. In fact, with LTO media, it takes physical destruction of the cartridge to really create a scenario where data cannot be retrieved from a tape.

Oh, and BRU PE has offered Doubler Mode (writing the same data to two tapes simultaneously) since 2006. We even sell Desktop, Rackmount, and library hardware packages that offer the Doubler Mode solution in a very easy to use, plug and play package.

One additional comment about your site – PreRoll Post is LTFS compatible, not LTFS certified or compliant. The compliance testing suite is still being defined and currently only applies to writers of the LTFS low-level driver tools. User-level applications are not currently being certified for compliance. The current list of compliant solutions is offered on the LTO.org site here (scroll to the bottom) – LTFS Compliant Solutions

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

[Tim Jones]

[Sam Lee] “will that PRP LTFS created backup be readable in BRU?”

As long as the PRP formatting used a unique serial number for the tape as it was created, BRU PE will import the tape’s ToC and provide it in the Restore panel just like a BRU PE archive so that you can search it with the LTFS volume is unmounted. We distinguish LTFS tapes by their serial numbers (generated when the tape is formatted).

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

[Tim Jones]

Kevin – while you have run into some of the GUI issues that we’ve suffered with our UI through the versions, one thing that we’re very proud of is that at no time has a BRU backup left you with a tape or disk based archive from which you could not restore. This cannot be said for any LTFS implementation.

For a perfect test example – select a few 10’s of GB of data and start writing them to tape with BRU. Before the job finishes, shut the tape drive off (simulating a power loss. hard tape failure or system failure). BRU PE will complain and the job will abort. Now, perform the same steps with a mounted LTFS tape – drag and drop the same files to the LTFS tape and before the copy completes, power off the drive.

From this situation, everything that BRU had written onto the tape can be easily restored. However, you’ll find that you can’t even remount the LTFS volume. Now, imagine that you were actually 2TB into a 2.5TB job. Where would you rather be with that data?

Just saying’ …

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