Either somebody here, or if you can point me to forums anywhere on the interwebs that I can sign up to to talk to people who use these with any regularity just to ask some questions only they would know.
Specific question example - does LTFS (tape file system) store fine grained timestamp information? What flexibility do I have for file systems (ext3, ext4, brtfs, NTFS) under LTFS? And similar verification of things I think I know but need to be sure before I plunk down 2 grand for a tape drive.
If anyone knows of others in the future (until I post that i've discovered all I need, or committed to buying the tape drive already) please still send me a message even if you don't bump this topic.
My project is storing LOTS and lots of digital video (at least many dozens of terabytes in the future, and decent chances of over 100tb if things work out opportunistically - ie access to a Red Weapon 8k cinema camera plus a 16 camera motion capture stage) and needing to have a system planned out that can eat and back up everything I throw at it without ever losing or silently corrupting a single bit!
I am in the process of designing up a D2D2T (disk to disk to tape) data migration project which moves extensive digital video data to a RAIT (redundant array of inexpensive tape) meaning parity tapes can recover for any missing/broken tape in the set! The disk stage alone is planned to be capable of growing from 32TB to 300TB in the future at least on the primary NAS/SAN. I am planning to use SnapRAID at least for the second stage of that process (tape preparation from the second NAS) because it does automatic data validity verification, creates parity files and enables RAID like functionality over the top of the file system. This lets me write these parity files (which are written to physically separate disks as protection from individual disk failure) to tape and apparently restore from as well. (and once the server configuration is restored, a missing volume from the drive array should be fully restorable - I plan to test this of course with an initial 3 data/1 parity 7.5TB data set before scaling up.)
Specific question example - does LTFS (tape file system) store fine grained timestamp information? What flexibility do I have for file systems (ext3, ext4, brtfs, NTFS) under LTFS? And similar verification of things I think I know but need to be sure before I plunk down 2 grand for a tape drive.
If anyone knows of others in the future (until I post that i've discovered all I need, or committed to buying the tape drive already) please still send me a message even if you don't bump this topic.
My project is storing LOTS and lots of digital video (at least many dozens of terabytes in the future, and decent chances of over 100tb if things work out opportunistically - ie access to a Red Weapon 8k cinema camera plus a 16 camera motion capture stage) and needing to have a system planned out that can eat and back up everything I throw at it without ever losing or silently corrupting a single bit!
I am in the process of designing up a D2D2T (disk to disk to tape) data migration project which moves extensive digital video data to a RAIT (redundant array of inexpensive tape) meaning parity tapes can recover for any missing/broken tape in the set! The disk stage alone is planned to be capable of growing from 32TB to 300TB in the future at least on the primary NAS/SAN. I am planning to use SnapRAID at least for the second stage of that process (tape preparation from the second NAS) because it does automatic data validity verification, creates parity files and enables RAID like functionality over the top of the file system. This lets me write these parity files (which are written to physically separate disks as protection from individual disk failure) to tape and apparently restore from as well. (and once the server configuration is restored, a missing volume from the drive array should be fully restorable - I plan to test this of course with an initial 3 data/1 parity 7.5TB data set before scaling up.)