Has anyone here been using LTO tape as a backup or archiving solution?  If so, how has that been working for you?

Philip

We use LTO-5 a lot.

We have a StorageDNA system (that uses LTFS) That has an 8 bay auto loader and runs client software on the variosu edit machines.

At the simplest we just archive the Avid media folder, project sources etc. But it can also archive based on an AAF of you sequence. And the next version will offer Avid bin archiving so you can archive anything (AMA inlcuded) in a bin.

It's fast and efficient. I don;t know how people manage with out a robust LTO solution....

Thanks, Pat!  That's actually the system we've been considering.  So it's no problem either to backup raw camera file folders as well?

We use a Cache-A LTO for backing up a 48tb media server.  The Cache-A is integrated with our CatDV database software.  The advantage that Cache-A units have is an internal hard drive that you can cache to before recording to LTO.

Lee 

We looked at Cache-A but eventually went with Storage DNA. We run the client software on a number of machines and don't really need to cache. We just stream stright over a 1Gb connection. StorageDNA had some nice features when we first compared and has seen a number of nice new features every update.

The tape library is useful as ours hold 4 dedicated LTO tapes than archive our central server spaces on a schedule.

We've even used it to restore only the original rushes form the original sources archive. Just pass it the AAF of the final offline and it can effectively conform via a restore the sources you need. neat.

Hi Pat:

              What kind of Dollars did you pay for your LTO 5 System ?

Mark

Another vote for StorageDNA.  Intuitive, some Avid-related features (AAF selective retrieval, retrieval of AMA sources, for example), and good support.