From the course: Video Production and Post Tips

What is LTO?

From the course: Video Production and Post Tips

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What is LTO?

- Hey there, I'm Robert Carman. - And I'm Rich Harrington. - And Rich, this week we're going to talk about sort of the higher end of archiving and something known as LTO. - Yeah, and the thing is you say it's higher end but I got to tell you, if you just bite the bullet, this is the kind of technology that just about anybody can benefit from. - Yeah, and so LTO is strangely a tape format. Hold on a second, tape? What's going on here? - Tape is dead, I heard. - Yeah, well videotape for the most part is dead and other tapes you've might have used but for data archiving, LTO tape is very much alive and it's probably the most robust long-term storage solution on the market. - You brought up a good point there. Long term. This technology actually originated back in the eighties. We had formats like DLT and AIT. But then companies, I believe it was HP, IBM and Seagate, which then became Quantum, came together and created the LTO standard, which is a nice open standard. It works with lots of different devices. - Linear tape open, that's a mouthful but that's what it means. - And the important thing here is shelf life. A lot of folks don't realize. They say "oh you know, I finished that project. I put the hard drive on the shelf." Well the problem, Rob, is you just leave a hard drive on a shelf, it's a magnet and if it doesn't have power after a year, you got a 50-50 chance of data loss. - Listen, I cannot tell you how many studios that I've walked in, truly around the world, and just on a bookshelf somewhere have stacks of external drives that haven't been turned on in forever. Best case scenario they have a spreadsheet or a database is what's on those drives. But I've seen it happen so many times where somebody goes to pull a drive off a shelf, plug it in, and it doesn't turn on. The data's corrupt or something. You get click, click, click, something like that. - One year of a hard drive not being plugged in, you've got a 50-50 chance of some data loss. And with big video files or RAID structures, this can be dangerous. - And so when you start looking into LTO, at first glance it seems cost prohibitive. Drives can range anywhere from $2500 up to a unit like this, which is about five grand. And it might seem like a lot of money to spend but in the long run, here's what I always tell people. Your bank, other Fortune 500 companies, people that cannot mess around with the integrity of data in the long run, are using LTO. - And the shelf life on these is what? - About 30 years. - So theoretically, if you're doing it right with your video production business you'll be retired before you'll have to worry about it. Or something better will come along. And that's what we've seen. We've seen this great evolution. And we'll talk about the different generations in a moment. But this is meant to be put on a shelf. It's a tape. You can put it on a shelf and it's just going to sit there with no data loss for decades. - Now, there's one really important distinction that I want to make about LTO. While it can be used for backup, it's really meant for archival. And that's an important distinction. A backup is something that, hey, I've got a data set here, I've got a data set here, and it's going to be a relatively temporary thing. - Something quick that you can access. If one drive goes down, you got another drive on your network or system that had the data. - And backups are great. You should backup everything on a daily basis, right? But archival is something where you're going to remove that data from whatever place that it's currently residing, and you want to put something on a shelf and not have to worry about it. And that's the solution that LTO represents. It's not something that you're just going to quick go "maybe I just want to make a backup of this and have quick access to it." Writing to these tapes takes a while but it's meant for long term. - For example, we have about 200 terabytes of active storage here in my office that's live and accessible. But if we were to just say "oh, let's keep going and going." We'd fill that up in about three months times. Three months projects, it's full. Maybe six months. Depends on the season. We've been in business for 15 years at this point. Obviously, I cannot afford the physical space of having all those drives online. Plus, just the cost. So even though this might be $5,000 and $2,500, Rob, these cartridges are a lot cheaper than physical hard drives. - Yeah, you know current generation LTO 7... And we'll get to the generations in just a minute. You know about $120, $130. But that holds about six terabytes of data. - And that's easily half to two-thirds the cost of buying a comparable drive that size. - And this is going to last 30 years, absolutely. And there's one last thing that I want to mention about the LTO ecosystem before we dive into the particulars. Is that LTO is robust in how it actually works. This is not, in most situations, just like dragging a file to a drive and just leaving it there uncategorized or uncatalogued. Sure, with the technology called LTFS, that we'll talk about this week, you can treat an LTO tape just like a hard drive. But most users are pairing an LTO drive with some sort of cataloging application that assists you in getting the data to the tape and, more importantly, restoring the data off the tape. So being able to search for file metadata and key words, and all those kinds of things, and you're even able to see thumbnails of what's going on, is key. When you build a huge archive over multiple years and you want to find something quickly, plugging in one tape after another is just not a tenable solution. - But even if you're in a small shop, in the long run, and not even really long run, just about a years time, you may find that this going to give you piece of mind. You're going to know that your projects are safe. You're going to be able to sell this as a service to your clients. And in the very near term, you'll stop spending as much money on hard drives. And you won't have to worry, is that thing going to fail on me when I'm not paying attention. Let's dig into the different generations as well as connection types that are available.

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