Re: CatDV Re-archive footage with Cache-A

I feel for both of you guys. We've had two techs, myself and another, working for the last couple weeks trying to get our archiving system on track. Archiving from CatDV to Cache-A has been a roller-coaster of an experience.

At first things were going very well. The footage would be backed up to LTO and a field in CatDV would auto-fill with the path to where the footage was archived. Our first problem was trying to easily verify that the footage had been successfully backed up. There is no way to compare file size, as Cache-A compresses the files. We did learn that by hovering over a file, it does show you the original size, but it took several days to discover that. You also cannot view the footage from Cache-A, to double check that it's actually there.

We proceeded with archiving this way for a few hours, then started running into issues. Occasionally, a file would not back up and we would receive an error message that CatDV could not find the path to Cache-A. I would try to reconnect to the Cache-A and it would work for a little while before failing again. Sometimes files will not back up and we receive an error message “Unable to make directory.” We have contacted Cache-A and CatDV and have yet to get a useful response.

I attempted to bring footage back in from after purging some test footage. I got an error message saying Cache-A cannot locate the file. Using the Cache-A web gui, we can locate the files on the LTO, but for whatever reason it is not found when trying to bring back the footage.

Every time we think we're making progress, something quirky happens. The Cache-A wont mount, error messages pop up. Our most recent issue, we have a 1.5TB LTO. Put 150GB onto it through CatDV and it said we had 1200GB of "space lost" so the tape was full.

So frustrating. I keep waiting for things to just fall into place and work but as of now, it hasn't happened. I hope things change, because we have a lot of time and money thrown into this and we really want it to work as advertised.

~ Nate