BRU PE is dead but your LTO tapes are not: what we learned migrating our studio's trapped vault
Long post, but I've seen this issue coming up in post-production environments and I haven't found much on Reddit, so I thought this would help.
Background: Some 10 years ago when I started with LTO tapes I found a tool called BRU PE (Producer's Edition, by TOLIS Group) that had been around the Post-production industry for a while. Loved it. But the company making the software went under during COVID in 2020 ending development and support. Today there is no download, no possibility of purchasing a license, support, or anything. Even after OWC bought it and tried to revamp it (abandoning that too in 2022). The software GUI never run natively on Apple Silicon, and a lot of companies (us included) had masters trapped in an LTO tape format that was just not there anymore unless you were using deprecated hardware and your old lincese and installer.
The thing is, the tapes were still fine, but the software route was dead, so after multiple attempts to go the official route with OWC (and failing) we decided to build an internal tool to be able to recover the tapes ourselves, and we did. We felt like this would be useful for other people so we built it as a service. My company is a Post-Production facility in Los Angeles, but we have always tinkered with internal scripts and in-house tools, so this became a project and we literally just went live with it. The process is 5 steps:
- Inventory first. We parse the actual tapes so there is no need for original catalogs (we happened to have ours, but to make it a service we understood many people wouldn't really have them)
- With that catalog, you can see what's on your actual backups and chose what you want to restore, all or part of it. Also serves as a reminder of what you ACTUALLY have to ensure the recovery is worth the time and money.
- We checksum verify the copy per file when we are offloading, and then again when we are either transferring the files to the client's own raid or new LTFS tapes to ensure consistency. Nowadays an LTFS open format is the most secure way of future-proofing.
So, if you want to have a look at what we built, we just went live last night. Please check it out at http://lightbenders.com/bru-restore
We made sure is as straightforward as it can be, with published pricing, and all the stages clearly defined.
I would love to know your thoughts.