Re: CatDV Re-archive footage with Cache-A

Lindsay,

We are using the CatDV plug-in exclusively, what you are calling the "Archive Media Files" tool. This only appears in CatDV if you have the plug-in. It didn't for us until our licenses came through.

We have to do it this way because we need CatDV to remember which LTO tape a given video clip was cataloged too.

I had a thought on your issue with it working when you drag and drop from Staging to VTape but not when you COPY from Staging to the VTape.

I know that as soon as you drop anything in the Vtape directory Cache-A takes off writing it immediately to tape. Just like a CD-writing session if the writing device (the LTO writer in this case) gets "starved" for data it will create an error (a buffer under-run). I wonder if that is what's happening... Cache-A starts writing but "catches up" to the copying and gets starved for data.

Early on, when we were using Cache-A outside of CatDV to create backups the people at Cache-A were telling our tech. to copy everything to a "Staging" folder first (seems like they are telling you that too) and then once everything was there, drag and drop it into Vtape. Their reasoning was that if you copy across a network directly into the Vtape folder the Cache-A might get starved for data at some point (like when copying a large file) and cause an error.

However, this doesn't work for our situation. First problem: we have to work with the plug-in as I mentioned. Second: we can't tell the plug-in to write to the staging folder because that is non-unique name... if all our footage was written to "staging" (as far as CatDV knows) then it is going to try to restore from "staging" instead of the LTO tape's serial number. So, we MUST write across the network to the Vtape and the plug-in intends for it to work this way. When you start the archiving process you can "see" Cache-A writing the clips from the catalog into the Vtape folder but the serial number of the tape gets recorded in CatDV.

At first we had our Cache-A passing through a 10/100 network and we were getting buffer under-run issues (I think... we were getting errors anyway). However, now we have a gigabit network and we can write with the Cache-A plug-in to the Vtape (through the plug-in) directly without any trouble at all- we never have errors. We're just working on the recall issues.

So what is your network speed?

We are going to get this to work! :)

Jeff