Summary:
LTO4 tape is the safest, most convenient way to back up and archive footage from tapeless cameras. This particular combination of tape drive, interface card and backup software shows LTO4 at its best.
Target Apps:
Shooters, editors, and producers who need to backup and archive tapeless camera footage.
What’s Missing:
Still too pricey for some.
System Requirements: Mac with a spare PCIe card slot. Mac OS 10.4 or later (excluding 10.4.9-10). 12MB disk space.
This Three-Vendor Solution Works Like a Well-Oiled Machine
Helmut Kobler
September 15, 2009 Source: Studio Daily
Just about every new camera system has ditched the tired, old idea of recording to tape. I thank my personal god for that, but not all tape needs to go the way of the Dodo. It turns out that a particular tape format called LTO4 is still the best option for backing up and archiving the footage you’ve shot on your tapeless camera (and no, you shouldn’t archive valuable footage to spare hard drives that sit on a shelf—drives left static for a year or two become unreliable).
LTO tape (stands for Linear Tape Open) has been around for many years, and is already used by financial companies and government to keep track of your old banking statements and parking tickets. LTO4 is the newest flavor of LTO, and its benefits are considerable:
A single $50 LTO4 tape can store 800GB of uncompressed video—that’s 26 whopping hours of 720/24p video from a Panasonic P2 camera, 38 hours of 1080/24p footage from a Sony EX3, or nearly 8 hours of 4K footage from a RED camera.
An LTO4 tape lasts about 30 years in normal storage conditions (ie, don’t leave it in your trunk indefinitely).
Some LTO4 drives can read/write data up to 120MBps—ie, much faster than reading/writing to a conventional SATA hard drive — so incremental backups go in a hurry.
There is, however, a problem with LTO4 tape…and it’s not really the cost. In fact, a fast, reliable LTO4 system can be had for under $3,300, which is reasonable for most professionals. LTO’s real problem has been the confusing and risky process of finding the right LTO4 drive, the right interface card, and the right backup software, and see them all work reliably together.
That’s what this is review is for. After months of research, I’ve found a Mac-based LTO4 solution that’s working great on a single workstation. You can buy it yourself piece-meal, or buy it as a bundle from one company (TOLIS Group, www.tolisgroup.com).
Here’s how the various components work together…
The Tape Drive
Many companies make LTO4 drives, but I chose the HP Ultrium 1840, which has a list price of $3,999 (naturally, it can be found at online retailers for much cheaper). The 1840 is a “full-height” external drive that’s about 12.5” inches long, 9” wide and 5” tall, and can easily fit on your desktop. It’s a speed-demon as far as LTO4 drives go, delivering up to about 120MBps of real-world throughput. And it’s got a confidence-inspiring 3-year warranty.
HP sells the 1840 with either an Ultra320 SCSI or SAS interface, but I chose the SAS option because it delivers top-speed through a single cable, without any configuration headaches that I associate with other SCSI formats.
The 1840 is as simple to use as a Fisher-Price toy—the front of the unit sports a Power button, a tape Eject button, and a couple of status LEDs. All you really have to do is gently nudge your LTO tape into the Ultrium, and the drive takes it in.
When the Ultrium is on, you can definitely hear its fan; I’d say it’s about as noisy than a typical 8-drive RAID, and definitely more noisy than a Mac Pro tower. When the drive is searching the tape, there’s also a little robotic whir thrown in for good measure. Given the noise, the 1840 isn’t something I want running all the time on my desk. That’s okay, though, because I can just turn it on when needed, and my backup software finds it immediately—no need to reboot the computer.
Note: HP also sells a smaller, less expensive “half height” drive called the Ultrium 1760 ($2,749), but I chose the 1840 because its max speed is about 20MBps faster, and it runs about 12 db quieter. If cost is a major concern, though, the 1760 is still a great option.
The Interface Card
The Ultrium drive connects to a computer via a Mini-SAS cable, so I installed an ATTO Technology H380 card ($395) into my Mac Pro to gain two SAS ports.
The H380 is a no-hassle kind of card. You do have to install a driver to use it (unless you’re running the new Snow Leopard OS, which comes with drivers built in), but the card runs cool, has no fan, and doesn’t interfere with the Mac’s ability to sleep. Although the card is designed for an 8x slot, you can install it in a 4x slot if it’s just running a single LTO4 drive.
If your Mac is running low on free card slots, ATTO also sells a highly-rated RAID card called the R380 ($1,095), which includes two SAS ports that can drive either a 4 or 8-drive RAID and an LTO4 drive simultaneously, at high speeds. The R380 is a great way to make the most of the Mac Pro’s rather paltry 3 spare expansion slots.
One more thing: most LTO4 drives use SAS or SCSI interfaces, but a few drives, such as CacheA’s PrimeCache ($7,995), can connect to your computer or network via an everyday Gigabit Ethernet cable. The drawback of an Ethernet connection is that it’s only half as fast as SAS, but that may be worth it if you want to archive video from multiple workstations. Since I’m archiving video from a single Mac, though, I opted for a zippy SAS-connected LTO drive.
The Backup Software
The final ingredient in my LTO4 cocktail is backup software called BRU Producer’s Edition ($499), from the TOLIS Group. The Mac operating system (Windows, too, for that matter) doesn’t work with tape drives natively, so I need BRU to control the HP Ultrium and read/write data to its tape.
BRU is a full-featured backup application, but its beauty is its simple QuickArchive mode, which provides a clean, streamlined interface for writing data to tape. To get started, just drag any files/folders from the Mac’s Finder into BRU’s Archive window, and then type in a name for your Archive session—for instance, “Wrestling B-Roll”. Then just hit BRU’s Archive button, and watch it go work writing the data to tape.
Writing goes relatively quickly—again, the Ultrium 1840/ ATTO H380 tag-team manages a real-world data rate of about 120MBps, but BRU also needs time to verify that your data has been accurately written to the tape. The bad news is: the verification pass usually takes as much time as the copy itself. The good news is: the wait is still tolerable. For instance, backing up 243GB of P2 video took an hour and 4 minutes—not too shabby for ultimate, peace-of-mind security!
To restore an archive session, just click BRU’s Restore button, which brings up a new interface that lists all the archived sessions you’ve created. You can restore a full session or pick and choose files/folders from that session. You can also type in a search string and let BRU show you all the backup tapes you’ve made that include similar items. When you’ve selected your data, another button click lets you choose where it will go—most likely, you’ll save it your editing RAID or a spare hard drive. Finally, just click BRU’s Restore button, and BRU starts reading your tape (reading goes just slightly faster than writing, including verification).
Go beyond BRU’s QuickArchive mode and you’ll find plenty of advanced features, such as the ability to schedule automatic back-ups for certain times, or to back-up only certain files from certain dates, etc. That’s all welcomed, but will probably be overkill for many shooters/editors who will simply connect their latest batch of footage-carrying cards or drives to their Mac, and back up immediately.
There is one potential gotcha when working with BRU, and that’s that no other backup software can recognize your BRU-formatted tapes. 10, 15, 20 years down the road, if you want to restore some old tape in your archive, you’ll need BRU-compatible software to do it (not to mention a tape drive that reads your LTO4 tapes…future LTO5 and LTO6 drives, which are on the drawing board in labs today, are guaranteed to work with LTO4 tape, but who knows after that.).
Given LTO’s long-term orientation, you might wonder if TOLIS Group will be around to sell a version of BRU that works with whatever new-fangled hardware and OS you’ll have in the future. There are no guarantees, of course, but TOLIS and BRU have been around since 1985, and it’s TOLIS policy to keep data compatible year after year. I definitely felt reassured to learn that today’s BRU can still read data files written more than 20 years ago, when BRU ran on Amiga computers and backed up files to floppy disks and prehistoric tape.
TOLIS has also placed BRU’s source code with a number of long-time clients and media industry groups—for instance, the code is currently with NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which runs the Grammy Awards), and TOLIS is working to place BRU code with SMPTE and the Society of Composers & Lyricists as well. In other words, if something ever happens to TOLIS Group, BRU can still rise from the ashes.
Bringing It All Together
You can build an LTO solution with other tape drives, interface cards and backup software, but a quick check of online support forums shows that some combinations don’t work well together. On the other hand, the HP Ultrium 1840, ATTO’s H380 card, and TOLIS’ BRU Producer’s Edition work like a well-oiled machine, so if you want a hassle-free experience, I heartily recommend this trio.
You can assemble the LTO hardware by scouring the net for cheap-o deals (including grey market hardware); if so, you might be able to acquire everything you need for as low as $3,300. A more trouble-free approach would be to consider buying everything in a bundle from TOLIS Group. The 1840 drive, interface card, SAS cable, BRU software, a blank LTO4 tape, a drive cleaning tape, and 12 months of telephone support go for $5,180 (a cheaper bundle based on HP’s smaller 1760 LTO drive is $4,015). Opting for the bundle means paying just about list price for everything, but you’ll get it from one source, and all the support you need to get your feet wet.
Comments (20) for "LTO4 Tape Archiving on the Mac"
1.
Or you could go with a network appliance that has on-board HDD so it doesn't tie up your CPU - like Cache-A's Prime Cache for less than $9K
Posted by Phil Keeling on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 05:55 PM
2.
Thanks for being concerned for other movie makers to such a great degree... that not only do you submit this (brilliant) solution for media sustainability, but I just want to thank you in person for your "Guerilla Film School" which shipped with your wonderful sci-fi short, Radius! Thanks, Helmut!
Posted by Tom Chaffer on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 06:06 PM
3.
On what do you base the founding assertion that "drives left static for a year or two become unreliable"? I have found estimates of from 5 to 30 years, but nothing so short as "a year or two."
Posted by David Dobson on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 06:30 PM
4.
I've been researching this type of thing for the last 6 months. It's refreshing to know I'm no too far off the marker. Thanks for the hard work! At the dismal rate we're archiving, it seems we'll have a 10 to 12 yr. gap of lost media due to the indecision of what to archive onto. Bummer, especially for feature films.
Posted by Peter Keenan on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 07:45 PM
5.
I just find it HUGELY ironic (to the point of sarcasm) that "tape" is so frowned upon because of dropouts, curl, oxide shedding, etc, and has such environmentally restrictive storage requirements compared to flash media, or hard drives, yet it is TAPE that comes to save the day and archive flash and optical media for the future.
The notes about software and a device to access the media go for ANY storage media, hard drive, flash, optical or tape. No there is no advantage to any format there.
Posted by Anthony on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 09:14 PM
6.
I've had an external hard drive fail after 6 months, another after a year. Others have lasted 3 years+. I think the point is that hard drives, being mechanical in nature are prone to failure sooner or later and shouldn't be relied on for long term archiving.
Posted by Robert Lech on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 11:20 PM
7.
I've been using tape since 1997 and those original tapes are still as good as the day I shot them. No dropouts no tape wear or stretching. Just long life, reliability, and minimal storage space--totally in the face of all criticism against tape. There's just no sensible business model in tapeless for me.
Posted by John Brune on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 @ 09:57 AM
8.
I for one would much rather have a box
of HDCAM tapes as a back up. Your solution has to portability. say 5 years from now you have to recover your data
Are you gonna have the same set up working? Will all the cards and software
still be working together? Will you have to keep a legacy computer alive? You can still recover Quad fifty years later.
Will your LT04 still be cooking in 50 Years. I did shows in the eighties on
1" that if I wanted to recut tomarrow
NO PROBLEM except where can i find a CMX
8" drive to recover the EDL????
Posted by Neil on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 @ 11:13 AM
9.
There is so much irony in tapeless cameras when, at the end, the visual data needs to live on tape.
It's great to know this set of hardware and software works together but the catch is being able to restore from those tapes a few years from now. It's good to know BRU's track record but many other vendors have been around for 10+ years (i.e.: ARCserve) and they can't restore something from three months ago despite having the same hardware and software versions.
Posted by Eric on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 @ 01:15 PM
10.
I was worried about all this when we got our first avid about 15 years ago so we bought the top of the line HP tape drive (Exabyte) and software (Retrospect) and a bunch of tapes and started backing up our avid media. Anybody want that drive and the tapes? I have no idea how to recover the files, and if I did they wouldn't work in the newer avids anyway. I vote for shooting on tape.
Posted by Scott on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 @ 05:39 PM
11.
It would be nice Mac OS X provides native archiving solution rather than using any other company software. I also wants to disagree that Windows XP and Vista and even Windows 7(I believe) has Backup software on the operating system which talks natively to LTO Tape drives which itself its a future proof.
Posted by Balaji on Thursday, September 17, 2009 @ 01:16 AM
12.
Re: Comment No. 3 about hard drives on the shelf. I have seen a total of three hard drives die while simply sitting on the shelf. Filling up a drive and storing it in a climate-controlled place is NOT good archiving practice.
Posted by Bill Pryor on Friday, September 18, 2009 @ 11:00 AM
13.
What about archiving on blu-ray disc? Is it really reliable?
Posted by Jeff on Friday, September 18, 2009 @ 11:09 AM
14.
Windows has had a native backup features in it since NT 4.0
Posted by CG on Friday, September 18, 2009 @ 12:12 PM
15.
Thanks for the kind words, Tom, glad you liked my earlier work!
For those who think it's better to shoot on tape, I think you're risking being out-maneuvered by shooters and production companies who are embracing this change. This is a fact: for the majority of projects, tapeless cameras and their accompanying workflows save considerable time and money versus their tape-based counterparts.
With tapeless, you can shoot more conveniently, add metadata more conveniently, capture the footage more conveniently, and archive it more conveniently (you'd need about 50 DVCPRO HD tapes to store the footage that a single $50 LTO4 tape handles. How much will a company pay to rent storage space for hundreds or thousands of video tapes that are shot over the years? Also, if you're worried about finding a working LTO4 deck 10 years from now, what makes you think you'll have an old DVCPRO HD or HDCAM deck on hand? 10 years from now, I think it will be easier to find an LTO4-compatible drive than it will be to find an out-dated and very-expensive-to-maintain tape deck.)
Panasonic is one of the most successful HD camera vendors around, but it now sells only *one* mainstream tape-based camera (the HDX900), while selling a dozen P2 cameras. The Red camera is tapeless. Sony is slower to convert to a truly-tapeless format (I don't count XDCAM disks as truly tapeless, because they have some of the same hassles of tape), but Sony does have a bonafide hit with the EX1 and EX3, which use solid-state cards. JVC is also going tapeless. The Canon 5D MkII is tapeless too. Are you guys planning on using vintage cameras for the rest of your careers? ;-)
The problem with tapeless is that it requires re-thinking how footage is shot and moved through post-production (and beyond). After 30-40 years of shooting tape, many people are reluctant to let go and learn something new (and suffer some of the slings and arrows that come from venturing into new territory...and there are definitely a few slings and arrows!). But the move to tapeless is in full-swing, and it's only going to accelerate...
Posted by Helmut Kobler on Friday, September 18, 2009 @ 12:56 PM
16.
I won't be unloading my Sony f900R anytime soon, though...
Posted by JMorgan on Sunday, September 20, 2009 @ 09:05 AM
17.
I've been shooting with an EX1 for over a year now and will never go back to tape. After looking into archiving solutions, I decided to archive to DL DVD optical. A $50 LTO can store 800 gigs but using my built in superdrive, I can get 800 gigs for about $100 in media. At that rate, I would have to archive about 42,000 gigs before the cost of the drive would pay for itself. (cost per gig of LTO - cost per gig of DL * cost of drive). You can check me on that - I'm an editor, not a math major.
I invested in tape over 10 years ago with a 20gig DLT system. The drive is collecting dust in my basement and if I had to get something back I would have to dust off the SCSI mac next to it.
Also... an 800 gig tape is A LOT of footage to lose if that one tape fails or gets lost or destroyed.
Personally, most of my projects are commercials and short videos. I can shoot on 8 gig cards and archive each card on one DL disc. Based on my experience with DLT and optical, I believe that optical will be supported longer than proprietary drives and backup software on the mac platform. Someday I'll be switching to archiving on BRD when the cost of those drives and media come down.
Posted by Andrew Wilson on Thursday, September 24, 2009 @ 12:34 PM
18.
The advantage of a tapeless workflow, I believe, really comes in at the codec level. P2 has opened up an exciting world of AVCIntra 100, etc. to replace a rather weak DVCProHD...without having to saturate the market with decks and recorders to make it a viable format. I believe that tapeless is about so much more than workflow; it is about creating an architecture for positive change in terms of codecs that will better serve the needs of today's clients and professionals.
Posted by Matt Browning on Thursday, October 8, 2009 @ 03:14 AM
19.
Thanx for this very educative article. I am really loking for a real storage solution. Anybody who can tell me about aby Indian resellers of BRU PE and Express H380 cards
Posted by Capt Mohan Rawat on Saturday, January 9, 2010 @ 02:10 AM
20.
First, a very big thanks for the well explained article on storage & archiving.
I just received my HP Ultrium 1760 LTO tape drive (320 SCSI) which came with HP data protector express software. This software seems complicated to me as it's complete backup software. I was looking for some easy to use software as I just need to move data from my local machine into the LTO in easy & restore it when needed. The software you have mentioned looks easy so I will have a look @ it.
Posted by harasi M on Friday, February 12, 2010 @ 04:07 PM
