By technical editor Matt Allard:
Archiving is one of those things it’s easy to ignore in favour of storing ever-increasing numbers of hard drives full of old media.
Some Hard drives can have a shelf life of as little as five years; by comparison, LTO tape can be stored safely for up to 35 years. Running costs are lower too with a 2.5TB cartridge costing around $40, cheaper than an equivalent hard disk.
Imagine Products’ software PreRoll Post aims to simplify the backup process and is available in a bundle with an LTO6 machine for around $4000 US. This isn’t exactly cheap but if you are serious about protecting your valuable material right now then a LTO solution is certainly worth investigating.
Here is a brief description of what the system offer from the manufacturer’s website:
PreRoll Post™ is an application that automates indexing your camera originals, complete with thumbs, proxies and metadata, while backing up full resolution media to local disk and long-term LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape.
PreRoll Post takes advantage of the Linear File Transfer System (LTFS) supported by tape drive manufacturers. The LTFS mounts a tape as a volume (hard disk) within OSX. This makes it possible to write and read from the tape as if it were a disk without proprietary software or formatting. It also makes PreRoll Post hardware independent—you can use it with any LTFS compliant tape drive.
The PreRoll Post software controls copy operations from field hard disks (created using ShotPut Pro™) onto LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape(s). You may choose to make an additional copy onto local hard disk at the same time. All copies are verified using MD5 checksum integrity algorithms.
For more on PreRoll post and other Imagine products software head over to their website.
