Tom Goldberg
Forum Replies Created
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Paul,
I can’t speak to having personally used it, but I’ve had several customers speak highly of Deltopia’s Deltawalker – you might want to take a look at https://deltawalker.com.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
The problem isn’t old software as Cache-A sold its assets to ProMax in September of 2014 and they have not released any new software for the original hardware since that time. The LTO-6 models are all running the final release v3.4.3.
I’m surprised you didn’t see any errors – did you ever check the Tape Info in the past? Did it ever indicate that files were really there? I’ve never seen that dialog report change over time, and we always recommended verifying that report before putting a tape away for archive.
Yes, PRP won’t run on the Cache-A and will require a Mac and a SAS card with any LTO drive or a Mac and a Thunderbolt LTO drive like the mLogic. I’m just thinking maybe you could find a third party that has some alternative way to read LTFS tapes to see if something is going on with your Cache-A. You might alternatively try a new archive on the Cache-A with a different tape to see if you can successfully write and recover newly written files.
Sorry that I can’t be more helpful in this case.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Dean, that is bad news indeed. It means that the Cache-A really doesn’t think any files got successfully written to to tape (it sounds like the directory got written to its partition but that doesn’t mean the files were actually written to the data partition). Also, you should have seen solid errors filling the archive sessions that wrote those files. 100% data loss and zero files means that the Cache-A will not be able to recover anything. The only thing I could suggest you might give it a try on other LTFS software – I think PreRollPost has a rebuild function that could actually scan the data partition for what’s really there.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Dean,
You did not provide quite enough info here – in your Tape Information, what was the “Space Lost” value? If that is small, the files should be there, if that is close to the 1059GB used, then something is likely very wrong with the tape.
The fact that you see the files when displaying “LTFS Volume” tends to sound like they are there – two things to try:
1) first eject the tape, delete it from the catalog and then reinsert it to have the Cache-A relearn it; that may clear up the problem
2) if that doesn’t work, try the Recover All function under the menu buttonIf neither of those work, you might want to check how the tape performs on any other LTFS device – it should be fully readible under PreRollPost or YoYotta or even the free LTFS distro.
I hope that helps.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Aaron,
As with any computer, suddenly interrupting power can corrupt your file system. You need to connect a mouse monitor and keyboard to the back of the unit, reboot and see what’s happening there. Hopefully running a manual file system check will sort it out – if not, you’re going to have to go to ProMax to get it fixed.
I suggest you see what comes up and maybe send me a screen shot directly off forum, I’ll do my best to help.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
I’ve had a lot of folks recommend the lightweight mac solution NeoFinder (https://www.cdfinder.de) – it has been around forever (even pre-OSX) and the author has kept it updated.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Kim,
You are on a forum where users are creating that much or more data every day, so the solutions folks are discussing here wouldn’t be practical for you. A question you need to answer for yourself is for how long are you looking to archive that data? A few years? The rest of your life?
You could have someone copy this to LTO for you (which is what most folks on this forum use) and it would be good for a predicted 30 years, but not a convenient or cost effective solution for that little data (a single LTO-6 tape holds more than 100x that much data).
You could use Time Machine as you suggested, or simply copy the edited video folder to another hard disk using Finder or any number of alternative tools like “Carbon Copy Cloner” or “Super Duper.” Any of these approaches leaves your backup on a hard disk drive which can’t be relied on for shelf storage for more than a few years. The best practices for content archived on hard disk drives are to make at least two or even better 3 copies, to access them periodically to ensure they are readable, and propagate the content to new media over time.
You could burn the data back to a set of DVDs but again, this is not archival – over time DVD media can become unreadable. There is so called archival quality “gold” DVD media available, but the real world life of these is dependent upon your DVD drive and is an unknown. A combination of DVD and hard disk drive backups may be a reasonable solution if you periodically check them and plan on propagating in the future.
Your best alternative at this point in time however is probably cloud storage. Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon and many others out there will look after your archives for a pretty modest fee for as little data as you have.
My recommendation would be to go ahead and just let TimeMachine backup your video and then put it up on the cloud to insure it is around for when your backup drive fails.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Time Machine is probably not your best option if you really want to archive your footage.
How many GB of data are you trying to preserve?
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Sadly the LTO Consortium since inception has locked out, in the drive firmware, all LTO drives from reading beyond the EOD marker. This was done ostensibly to protect erased tapes from being read since erasing a data tape only resets the EOD, it does not clear or overwrite anything that was on the tape.
If the EOD is at 0 in the data partition, I know of no way for you to get the data back short of using a data recovery service. If it is only the index partition that was reset, you can rebuild the index and get to your data.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Aaron,
That message tells you that the Cache-A’s internal database of all catalogs has become corrupted (basically a mySQL error). This usually can be easily repaired by ProMax support or by anyone logging in through Cache-A’s maintenance login. The process is not difficult but any errors could cause bigger problems.
I recommend that you contact ProMax support to get this fixed, but if that doesn’t work for you and you are comfortable using a command line, please send me an email directly and I’ll provide the commands.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net