How Cintrex AV uses LTO Tape for Video Backup

 

Cintrex AV regularly archives video files to both LTO-6 and LTO-8 tapes. We use Ultrium tapes for both archiving and delivering files to our customers and for internal company storage.  As part of our services Cintrex provides 90 days of backup storage on all of our completed customer media conversion projects. This means that we need to be able to keep large amounts of video data on-hand, especially in the 90 days following the holiday season. To to this, we utilize LTO tapes as a supplement to several network connected Drobo and EVO storage systems. We’ll often back up multi-terabyte jobs directly to LTO tape, saving our spinning disk storage for jobs that we may need to access more actively. We use Hewlett-Packard and MagStor LTO tape drives, and format the tapes with YoYotta and MyLTO LTFS software.

Different generations of LTO Ultrium tape have different native and compressed capacities. Because we typically store only video content on LTO tape, the hardware compression provided by the tape drive has little to no effect. We can store up 11.5TB on LTO-8 tapes.

For large customer jobs, we often provide the customer an LTFS formatted LTO tape containing all of their digitized media files, as backup for the job just completed, for their own permanent archive.

Occasionally, we restore content off customer provided LTO tapes. In addition to the software tools mentioned above, we have experience with, and the tools, for restoring content off LTO tapes formatted in TAR, HPE StoreOpen, Backup Exec, Arcserve, and BRU-PE