Article: Inexpensive archiving for tapeless media

	NAB Expo Inexpensive archiving for tapeless media Thousands of members of Creative COW were at the 2011 NAB Show, and we are pleased to bring you some of their reports. In this entry, blogged from NAB 2011, Shane Ross had a mission, which was to search for a reasonably priced archiving solution of tapeless media that all of us not-so-big production and post production people could afford. Look now at Prime CACHE-A and Pro CACHE-A, BRU by the Tolis Group, and Edit Bay Production Desktop with this talented editor. Feature   04/27/2011 Author: Shane Ross

Great report- little sad to see the pricing is still well out of reach for many folks. I'm still dying for something as cheap and simple as an SDHC card with longevity and durability.

Noah

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Seriously - some has GOT to figure out an answer. They will make BANK from all the millions who want it. Till then I have literally captured stuff from a card and lid it back to tape! Talk about going backwards in time. SDHC cards are now getting cheap enough that we can save them as camera neg and not reuse them... wishing a $500 100GB blu-ray dvd burner with $25 media was in my amazon shopping cart...

Thanks,
Harry

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Great post just want to add the entry level Cache-A Prime Cache LTO-4 is $5995.

I looked at both systems, too, and I also chose BRU PE. Cache-A has some really nice features (especially for workgroups), but given Tolis Group's great reputation for support, I didn't think it was worth the extra money for a small studio like mine.

I got BRU with an LTO-5 drive and HBA for less than an LTO-4 Cache-A three or four months ago, and it has been rock-solid.

I rant and rave about the unreliability of hard drive archives every chance I get on the COW, and I'd recommend this system to anyone who has a shelf full of hard drives, but lacks the nerves of steel it takes to sleep well with irreplaceable data on them.

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I'm glad your hard drives haven't failed yet, but odds are that they will.

I've been using LTO-3 for a couple years. LTO archiving does indeed work, though it takes a long time to write and read; I've restored many files with it.

The biggest problem now is off-site storage. Unlike many other businesses, ours generates a ton of data, so backing up via the cloud is out of the question. I literally have a suitcase of tapes, and on occasion I've taken it off-site for safekeeping. But that is not a viable long-term, every-day solution for me.

The larger LTO-5 format would help a bit, but not enough. Ideas please?

[Jeremy Garchow] "If you charge your clients a nominal fee for long term archive, it will help to defray the initial cost.

And to Bob Cole, make two tapes. We do."

Thanks. Very interesting.

1. If you charge for long term archive, do you run the risk of liability in case the archive fails? Or do you use contract language more typical of self-storage facilities, along the lines of "you should have insurance for your assets, because we don't guarantee..."

2. two tapes -- great idea. I sometimes do that, when I'm in the middle of a long-term project. But for routine backup, I don't have the time for two copies. When I get LTO-5, I will try to do that. With LTO-3, it would just be too much work.

I saw something very interesting at the Quantum booth at NAB, they have a free downloadable utility called LTFS, what this does is take advantage of the partitioning capability of LTO5 to create essentially a volume that is mounted in the finder like a regular hard disk. You can then drag and drop files to the volume and it will just write them to tape like a regular hard drive, and it will update the partition table to reflect what is now on the tape, so if you put the tape back in and mount it, it will show you what is on the tape. You can also move files around and it will update the folder, but not folders. Also if you delete stuff from the partition, you lose the pointer, so that space cannot be claimed back until you reformat the tape, then you have full capacity again. Pretty neat, especially as it's a free utility, and very easy to use.

David :D

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Yes, David. Cache-A is adding this feature on their LTO-5 ProCache and eventually all of their LTO5 products.

For Bob Cole, it helps linear tape behave more like a hard drive. LTFS is Linear Tape File System. Here's a Cache-A view of LTFS.

http://www.cache-a.com/ftpcommon/Cache-A_LTFS_FAQ_020411.pdf

Jeremy

I'm not an expert in LTFS. We still have LTO4, but Cache-A requires no extra software as they have a layer of software running in the appliance itself. And yes, data is cached to an internal hard drive, but in this case, it's more about the software. I am going to write a more fully featured article on the Cache-A in the near future. It's one of those products that is worth a little extra dough, in my humble opinion.

[Bob Cole] "If one of the advantages of Cache-A is the ability to run using open source software, BUT Cache-A has gotten around the problem of backing up updates on what is essentially a linear medium of tape, by adding their own layer of software, does that mean that the "open source software advantage" is gone? Or not?"

This software is used to interact with how you get the data on to tape, and some software actually write the data to a proprietary structure. Cache-A archives are stored in such a way that other tape players will be able to read the data more easily than other solutions. With other solutions, it will be very very hard to get the data off of the tape as it is so tied to how the software writes the data to tape. I think it was mentioned earlier, but Cache-A uses a tar system, which is a pretty benign format. LTFS is different.

Bob,

The 400/800 rating on LTOs is the native/compressed capacity. LTO drives can do hardware compression for certain data types, mainly text-heavy data. For video, all compression is handled via the codec you are using and the LTO will just roll it uncompressed to the tape. So go by the smaller number when dealing with video data.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

Actually, if you own Cache-A LTO-5 product now, I believe they will provide a free LTFS update to your tool. It's noteworthy to see what Front Porch is saying about their desire to make Archive eXchange Format(AXF),THE open digital storage format.

I've spoken with FP about Their vision for the archive future which today is focused on Enterprise solutions. Of course this means we small companies stay out in the cold for the time being because $50,000 and up is a bit much for vault solutions.

Here's another vote for BRU from Tolis Group. I've been using it for almost 2 years with an HP LTO4 drive. The software is not completely user friendly, but definitely does the job. The support is great.
Tolis has been around for more than 20 years, I believe. They were backing up old Amiga content, and can still restore it!

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Do we know for sure that computer tape is more reliable than hard drives? I have to say, I was backing up to DDS-2 and AIT for years and I abandoned the practice because it was too slow, too labor intensive, and the tapes failed sometimes anyway. I've actually had more tape failures than hard drive failures so I'm not convinced about the superior reliability of tape. Anyone have hard evidence?

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[Eric Susch] "Do we know for sure that computer tape is more reliable than hard drives? I have to say, I was backing up to DDS-2 and AIT for years and I abandoned the practice because it was too slow, too labor intensive, and the tapes failed sometimes anyway. I've actually had more tape failures than hard drive failures so I'm not convinced about the superior reliability of tape. Anyone have hard evidence?"

Depends on what your criteria is for "reliable". This thread is discussing archiving, and your past experiences are with backup on obsolete formats. Tape is ideal for writing to and setting aside most of the time, disk is ideal for always-on applications. If you want storage you can reliably set on a shelf for years and still successfully access later, tape is intrinsically superior. HDDs have motors and bearings that will seize if not used regularly. That's why you will see many posts on these forums from people archiving to bare HDDs explaining that they spin them up avery few months just to make sure they still work. Tape is designed for archive duty, and LTO in particular is very sturdy. I can only speak from personal experience, and the 800+ tape LTO-3 archive I built for my old job is still restoring data from 2006 regularly and uneventfully.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Eric Susch] " I think that is what is driving the conventional wisdom that tape is more reliable than hard drives, not facts."

Eric, I appreciate your skepticism, but sometimes the conventional wisdom is correct. I suspect Quantum has whitepapers which would satisfy you. For my part, I've never lost a verified tape backup, but have had to discard quite a few hard drives, and had data retrieval problems several times with "working" drives as well. I use both hard drives and tapes as backups -- but only tape as an "archive."

Bob C

What does "ramping the heads" mean? Whatever it is-- is it a very new thing? I have some older Lacies from 2004, 2007, and 2009, and since 2009 I've been using WD MyBooks. Would these all have ramped heads?

Also, I happened to come across this thread after posting a question in the FCP forum. But since it relates to this topic, I'm going to paste my question here and was wondering what your advice would be?:

"This doesn't necessarily apply to a drive that is already failing, but I remember reading somewhere that you should do a full surface scan of your external harddrives at least once a year, and you can't just leave them idle for long periods of time.

Could you guys tell me the best way to do this? Using Disk Utility? Or do I need to buy a program like DiskWarrior? Or, if the harddrive manufacture supplies a program in the box, should I use that?

One person wrote in another forum: "If I had to use disks for archiving, I'd make sure that I attached them to a computer no less than once a year and do a full surface scan of every accessible sector on the disk using CHKDSK. This would re-map any sectors going "soft" before they dissolve altogether and take precious data with them." Is there a "mac way" to do this?

Someone else there wrote "I stict to WD Diagnostic Utility running in Windows, [on the mac, i think] and I swear by the results and job it does."

So, what's the best way to approach this in your opinions? And even if a drive seems to be working fine, when does it become too old to use?

I mainly use the 2 TB WD MyBooks, either with firewire or with eSata. I haven't had any crash yet, but the oldest one is only 2 years old. I'm more worried about my Lacies, which are between 2 and 6 years old)

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Isaac