Tim Jones
Forum Replies Created
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Using an LTO drive is simple – insert tape, run software, eject tape, store 🙂 .
However, I believe that you’re asking about using the software that controls the LTO drive. In that case, it varies depending on the software that you’re using. Unfortunately, there are as many different ways as there are software options and many of those options have multiple methods of use.
Do you have a specific platform and software product in mind?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Ugh – belay my last – apparently, you can only buy the desktop and Live Capture Plus products directly.
Too bad, because if you have any experience with Java and Tomcat, installation and configuration is pretty straight forward.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Have you considered purchasing your licenses directly from their web store?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
There are a couple of things that can affect how much data is written onto a tape –
Tape condition / drive condition – This can cause soft errors – where data blocks must be written to the tape multiple times to make sure that the blocks are written properly – and Hard errors – where the tape reports a lower available capacity than you would expect because of errors on the tape that cause segments of the media to be unusable.
Software overhead – the software used will have overhead associated with how the data is written to the tape – the software’s format. In much the same way as a file written to a disk filesystem will cause eventual capacity loss because there will be a “smallest writeable size” (sometimes referred to as a cluster), most backup software has similar “smallest writeable size. For BRU, that overhead is around 18%. This is not wasted space, but rather the extra data that we track for your files to insure the most reliable recovery of your data.
If you combine these situations, you could witness a rather noticeable drop in storage capacity as it relates to your filesystem data.
What were you seeing previously with your LTO-4 drive and BRU PE?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Of course, this is a bit slanted by our stand on the recoverability of all things written to tape, but for more depth on the subject, you can start here:
https://knowledgebase.tolisgroup.com/?View=entry&EntryID=263
Tim
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Doesn’t work. Each vendor has a bad habit of locking their apps to their drive brand identifiers.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
To answer the original poster, I really like the Seagate Constellation drives. They are more expensive than the consumer level models, but they are designed to last longer. I personally use bare drives with OWC’s NewerTech Voyager Q as it provides ease of swap and both eSATA and USB-3 connectivity. Works great for both my Mac and PC systems.
For discussion, Mel’s example of the failed WD drive is why we left WD and went to Seagate in all of our storage appliances. Over a 3 year period, we witnessed a huge failure of WD Black drives, most within the first 3 months of utilization. While WD happily replaced the failed drives, the fact that our customers had to deal with drive replacement at this level was unacceptable.
Since then, we’ve moved to the Seagate Constellation family in both our 3.5″ and 2.5″ installations and we’ve had 2 failures since the shift and those 2 were DOA and we suspect that they were the victim of problems in shipping.
Granted, our burn in test probably exercises a drive more in a 4 day period than most users would in a year of average use, but that’s why we do it – we cull the herd. If the drive fails here, it won’t fail at the customer’s site.
In reference to his mention of the old drives, we’ve also got system running on older pSCSI drives from the ’90s that still boot and run without errors – Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, AT&T, Motorola – all growing very long in the teeth, but all still running with o problems on their original drives. Moral of that store – “they don’t make ’em like they used to.” 🙂
WD’s quality may have improved since last year, but we were unwilling to take the chance and revisit them.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
A 2,1 will work fine. You will need to run the EFI Configuration utility to insure that the H680’s slot is at least an x4 lane slot, but other wise you’ll be fine. We actually test on an original 1,1 running 10.4.11 as our base model test environment.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
In a few words – yes, it is.
But, you don’t need to click to skim. Just slide the pointer over the clip and move the pointer left and right.
Since my trackpad is right next to my keyboard, and most of my keyboard shortcuts are done with my left hand, it’s really easy to simply slide back and forth over the trackpad.
Of course, I’ve also used Wacom tablets for year to do similar stuff in other apps.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Nope, not quite that simple – you have to find the interconnected blocks first before you can place an appropriate close onto the file.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!