All Posts Tagged With: "LTO"

NAB Preivew: Cache-A LTO-4 Archive Drive for Video Pros

April 6th, 2009 • Thomas Tomchak • Comments • Related • Filed Under

To those that know me it will come as no surprise that I’m a backup nerd. Since owning my first DAT drive in the mid 90’s that held a grand total of 2 gigs per tape (compressed) I’ve been interested in backup technology, redundancy and “playing it safe” when it comes to my data. That trend has been extended to my business for the benefit of my company as well as my clients.

This post will discuss a new backup appliance being introduced at NAB this year, and cover in general terms how we currently use its predecessor in our workflow. Even if you have your own method of archiving and don’t need anything at this time, you might want to read about our process toward the end of the post to see if you can benefit from it at all.

Eternal Backup of the Spotless Drive (Part 2 of 2)

December 5th, 2008 • Scott Roberts • Comments • Related • Filed Under

This is the second of a two part series on the Quantum A-Series LTO drive. You can find part 1 here.

Once Quantum released the unbelievably fantastic Version 3 upgrade three months ago, any minor inconvenience we were having with the tape drive seemed to disappear. They really did a great job listening to client comments and fixed virtually every problem that needed to be addressed. The interface is more fluid (you used to not be able to adjust the size of the windows), and there is no longer a self-destruct button next to the eject button. There is now an automatic preventative measure in place to no longer lose the table of contents (a problem we had early in its use, it appeared worse than it actually was). We can fill the tapes up as full as we want (we used to need to add a cushion of space to prevent filling the tapes “too full”). I can now let my pals < and ? into the drive without concern. Oh, they can invite the rest of their friends as well, the blacklist is lifted! There is still only a 97 character limit for filenames, but only once in a blue moon do I export FCP movies titled…

Talking LTO on the Buzz with Larry Jordan

November 28th, 2008 • Thomas Tomchak • Comments • Related • Filed Under


After a few weeks of email exchanges about backup strategies with the “Ever Handsome” Larry Jordan, he invited me on the Digital Production Buzz to talk about my experience with the Quantum A-Series LTO backup drive. If you don’t normally listen to the show, below is an excerpt of my interview with him. If you would like to become a regular listener, you can subscribe to the show on iTunes. The show airs weekly and you can’t help but learn something new with each new episode. 

Listen to Interview

Eternal Backup of the Spotless Drive (Part 1 of 2)

November 28th, 2008 • Scott Roberts • Comments • Related • Filed Under

Archival of editing projects and tapeless camera originals is a hot topic these days, with opinions flying everywhere. Today’s post covers our experiences with both hard drives and the new A-Series LTO drive from Quantum.

In early 2008, we decided to switch to LTO tapes for all of our long term archiving.  We previously used external IDE drives (well, internal drives put in cases to make them external) for our backups.  They work decently for at least a while.  The problem was, it got to the point that we had to use Chronosync, a file synchronizing software, to bring back any element from a project because digital hits would appear in the video files due to bad data blocks copying over from the drives back onto our system.