#Exabyte and tape users?
13 messages in this thread
Are there any users of Exabyte 8mm data tape drives out there? I've got a few
utilities that are useful for these drives… actually, some of these
utilities are good for any sorts of tape drives, for backup, data exchange with
other types of computers, etc.
Exabytes are often used by video people to exchange data to Abekas video
systems.
John,
With the Toaster Flyer and the FAST DP/R coming on the market, high-capacity
tape backups are going to become more important to the DTV producer. I have
tried to get the Exabyte 2GB (uncompressed) and the Sony 4GB (uncompressed) DAT
drives up with the Flyer (SCSI Port C) but I have not had any sucess. The same
drive does work using someone else's controller therefore I blame
FlyerScsi.device.
I would be interested in your utilities and any other tips/tricks you might be
able to share.
-John
I don't have a Flyer yet, but I'm sure I will eventually. Has NewTek said
anything definitive about whether they've tested tape devices with the
FlyerScsi.device? Perhaps they simply omitted those commands from the driver.
🙁
I agree, multi-gig backup devices are absolutely necessary. I don't know how
people get along with these little 250 meg units. I've got a 5 gig Exabyte for
backups, and I don't think the $8-10 tapes last long enough. With 2-3 gigs on
hard drives on one machine in my office, I have to swap tapes almost daily,
depending on what kind of backups I do.
I've got a collection of 'tar' utilities for different machines: Amiga, Mac,
WinNT, DOS. Plus a few batch files I made for my own use.
John,
We have an EXB8505XL for use with NewTek Flyer. I'm using our Warp Engines
SCSII port because I can't get AmiBack to recognize it if I run from Flyer C
port.
Although it backs up at 30 mb / min. (its rated capacity) from my system drive
it only runs at 8 mb / min. when backing up video from the Flyer. Apparently
Flyers VTASK compression must be reinterpretted when passing through the
Amiga's DOS busses. NewTek says they're working on the problem. I sure hope
they hurry cause continued use of the Flyer could be tedious if my machine has
to be down 12 to 20 hours between video projects.
So . . . .
What about your utillities?
RUSS SPENCER / Michael Miloff & Associates
For the Amiga, I only have 'tar' and the BTN tape drivers. With this, you can
exchange tapes with Unix systems, as well as getting a TAPE: device. I use it
for backing up the Amiga, along with a few 'execute' scripts to automate the
process.
Rated capacity is often far higher than the actual through-put, on any system,
especially with the Exabyte. Actually, their figure is quite misleading. Even
if you could dump data at 30 meg/sec, it couldn't write it to tape that
quickly. The Amiga's SCSI is quite fast compared to most computers. Several
years ago, I know that hard drive manufacturers were using them as inexpensive
yet fast SCSI test machines, since they could move SCSI data faster than what
was possible on PCs or Macs.
Michael,
I was able to get AmiBack to recognize an Exabyte 2GB DAT drive and the Sony
4GB DAT off of FlyerScsi.device, however whenever I did a backup of a system
partition, through FlyerScsi.device I always got errors.
-John
Did you have to mount FC3: or whatever to get AmiBack to see the drives? I can
mount the drive and get Opus to recognize it (but not read it) but AB doesn't
seem to want to see it.
Thanks for the reply,
RUSS SPENCER / Micael Miloff & Associates
Michael,
No, I did not have to mount fc3:. What I did is run AmiBack and under
configure tape dirve, I selected FlyerScsi.device Unit # 206 (Flyer C unit 6).
Then it recognized the tape drive. At that time I did a back-up with "compare"
as my verification, the back-up went fine but the "compare" reported all sorts
of errors.
-John
Although I'm able to back up my Flyer with no verify errors off my WarpEngine
SCSII port I'll try your suggestion re: the Flyer C port to see what happens,
especially if it makes any difference in how much time it takes to back up. My
9 gig drive took 29 hours – yech!
Russ Spencer / Michael Miloff & Associates
John,
My understanding is that they admit that they need to do a little more work on
FlyerScsi.device. However, I think that they are also planing direct support
of tape devices in a future .rev of the software that will give a higher
performance by staying on the Flyer's SCSI bus or something. That makes me
wonder if they are going to "fix" FlyerScsi.device or just make their own hacks
around it.
-John
I'm working on a PC/DOS/Windows platform and looking at getting an 8505XL for
backup (250 mgs/tape just doesn't cut it for a 2G HD) and data exchange to
Abekas. Until now I was only aware of a product for Exabyte->Abekas from ASDG.
I don't really know what this software does, what it should do, or whats
involved in the data exchange with Abekas. Can you give an explanation? What
differentiates your utilities from ASDG's?
TIA,
JDH
The Abekas originally used its own data format on the tape. All tape devices
just write "blocks" of data of a given size, and it's up to applications to
pack and decipher the raw tape data. In the Abekas's case, it dumped the raw
digitized video data to tape. So software like ASDG's reads and writes the
Abekas' format of data.
When I said "my" utilities, I didn't mean a product from my company, I meant
some other freeware tools I'd collected and massaged a bit to make them more
useful. For example, I have several versions of 'tar', a popular Unix utility
for backing up files to tape.
Newer Abekas machines will read 'tar' files that contain Targa image files, as
I understand it, which makes the older proprietary format less useful. You
could easily build a 'tar' tape of Targa files with the freeware 'tar' I found,
for example.
Thanks for the info.
JDH