Picture this scenario. You just bought a nice Raid-5 storage system for your video editing assets. After half a year, you seem to have filled it up. You paid $40,000 dollars for the initial investment of one storage chassis. The manufacturer offers a supplemental chassis of storage to attach to your first chassis for the nice discounted price of $35,000. There must be a more affordable solution, right?
Video archiving has come to be a forefront technical question in the past few years. When people hear “video archiving,” mental images of complex robots moving tapes and even more complex cataloging come to mind. In the past few years, the perception and the reality of archiving have changed quite a bit. Video archiving has become simpler than ever. This issue, we will look at the more common archiving solutions available and how simple, robust and dependable they have become.
LTO Tape –Champion of the Archive
LTO tape is currently the most popular format for archiving. LTO stands for “Linear Tape-Open.” LTO tape was first released in the year 2000 and every few years since has been updated. We are currently on the 5th generation of LTO tape, or as it’s more commonly called “LTO-5.” With each generation change of LTO tape, the total amount of data you are able to store on a LTO tape has grown as well. Currently shipping LTO-5 tape can store 1.5TB per tape. This is a huge improvement from the initial LTO offering of 100GB.
LTO tape is much more robust than most storage. LTO tape has a lifespan of anywhere from 15-30 years. You can load and unload each tape around 5000 times. A 1.5 TB LTO-5 tape will cost you under $50 as well making it the most cost efficient solution out there. I have seen many LTO demonstrations where the presenter will drop the LTO tape to show how robust they are. Although LTO is more robust than most storage, it is not bulletproof. Dropping an LTO tape could potentially damage to the leader pin. The leader pin is the part that holds the physical tape in place inside the tape cartridge. If that breaks, so does your tape.
Using an LTO tape archive can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. They can take up an entire rack in your server room, or they can sit in your editing suite next to your mouse pad. You can have a system that will create and label its own bar code system and then have robotic arms pull those tapes out of the archive. These systems typically will hold hundreds of tapes. You can also have a smaller LTO archives that just do one tape at a time where you are putting the tapes on the shelf without the assistance of robots.
The thing that really makes the LTO tape an intelligent medium for storing media is the fact that there is a file system attached to each tape. You deal with file systems every day and may not know it. When you buy a USB thumb drive that works in both your Mac and PC it is because there is a file system on the thumb drive called Fat32. The Fat32 format enables drives to be seen by both Macs and PCs.
Most LTO tapes deal in a file system called LTFS (Linear Tape File System). This enables the video files on the tape to be indexed, tapes to be managed and helps you maintain control of the locations of your video files. This enables customers with LTO drives that hold just one tape, to manage all the tapes in their library and know exactly what tape has what files and projects on it.
There is another great benefit of LTFS formatted LTO tapes. In most software applications, your LTO tape will show up on your desktop exactly as a USB thumb drive would. This enables people with LTO archives to just drag and drop the files they want to archive to the tape (which shows up on your desktop as a drive). The flipside to this is as simple as it is to drag and drop a file to the LTO archive tape, it’s just as simple to browse the folders of the LTO archive tape to restore from your archive. This makes this daunting video archive behave just like any other external hard drive. This makes the learning curve on LTO archives quite minimal as 99% of video professionals have used external hard drives.
Once you start archiving multiple tapes, your archive system will reliably start indexing the metadata about those tapes. Most manufacturers will have a light web-browsing user interface where you can search your archived tapes. You can search by project name, file name, or date created. You can also create custom fields to search from such as videographer name, shooting location, just about anything you could imagine. This lets users start with a simple setup, and then customize it to fit their specific needs. This means you can search in the software user interface and it will tell you exactly which LTO tape will have those video files and assets.
There are other manufacturers out there that come up with their own file systems to compete with LTFS. Manufacturers will claim that their file systems are better for a myriad of reasons. The reality is LTFS is so widely supported by so many different manufacturers that you will never find yourself abandoned when a manufacturer decides to abandon that product line. When choosing an archive, make sure you choose a file system that will be here 20 years from now. Never give in to the file system of one manufacturer for your video archive. If that manufacturer goes out of business…so does your file system and any hope for future support for it. This is the archive of your life’s work, make sure it’s protected.
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, Fox, Versus, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, Powderhouse and many others.
You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com.
You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@