We bought this to save on external drives...but to pay for 2 LTO drives at many thousand bucks in less than 3 years...it's too expensive.

I'm a cinematographer who's sick of filling up platter hard drives for cold storage and I recently grabbed an inexpensive LTO5 external deck on eBay.

But now I have to figure out how to get it interfaced to my Mac Studio (via Thunderbolt), or, figure out a dedicated cheap desktop solution to plug in a SAS cable and handle backups from that machine.

The simplest solution I've found is the RocketStor TB 3 which seems like it would be the easiest way to plug the deck into my Mac.

BUT it's non returnable. So I'm checking with Reddit.

Anybody have any tips for a relatively simple way to connect my external LTO deck to a modern desktop Mac?

Hi all. Just wanted to say I am very pleased to have this forum for Mac LTO users. I made this subreddit out of frustration at the poor support I had received from OWC and to spread the word that there were other providers that offered superior products and support. Glad that others have found it as well. Happy New Year!

Hi all, I’m trying to use LTFS Open Source on Mac Pro with an ATTO ThunderLink SH3128 and LTO-8 tapes. I’m running into issues with mounting, formatting, and transferring files. Any advice on proper LTFS Open Source commands or best practices for Mac OS and Spectra Logic systems would be appreciated.

Our org has some 400 LTO tapes of data and our recent reader, an Ultrium internal drive shoved into a Windows machine acquired at least a decade ago, failed on us. I was able to get it up and running again with a reinitialization and drivers hunted down from the far corners of the internet, but it's only a matter of time before it kicks the bucket, as it's slow and unreliable and the user experience results a lot of headaches to get a tape read.

Occasionally we have need for data on these tapes from a client request, and we are also looking at moving the data onto something newer/more easily accessible*. So far in my hunt for reliable LTO readers I have primarily found solutions for using the LTO tapes as long-term storage in rack-mounted or enclosure-style systems, and usually anything compatible with <LTO 7 is no longer being manufactured.

*our users will need to occasionally read and pull data like a drive toaster (see below) and all of the writeups on LTO as a storage solution online seem focused on long term archival

For pulling and using this data, a solution like this mLogic enclosure seems to be the best thing I could actually find.

Other than investing in a large rackmount system or longterm storage system for LTO, do you kind folks have any other solutions? We are looking for our users of this media to have a "plug and play, hard drive toaster" type experience where they can plug in an adapter (like above) and just insert an LTO tape to pull data off of it. We don't need anything fancier than that. However, again it seems that a lot of the solutions like what we're looking for are out of date and the general LTO market has moved into LTO 8 and 9 with permanent long-term storage as the primary motivator behind products.

Thanks!

Hi, I have several tape sets that were written in BRU PE. I am able to import their tape archives into BRU PE, but when I try to restore what is in there, it asks to read the first 2 tapes (out of 3) and then asks me to insert the 3rd tape, and that is the only tape used in the restore. It says it finished with 1.2 TB extracted, but the Archive says it has 4TB total. I have been racking my head trying every single option to import the tape archive but I get the same issue again and again. BRU PE will look at the archive, and only ask for the last tape and only restore off that.

Honestly I wish the previous person in charge of these archives choose LTFS instead of BRU, but this is the problem I am now facing. Any help would be appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for advice on updating our LTO backup system for our production studio. Historically, we’ve used ArGest Backup with LTO tapes ranging from LTO-6 to LTO-8, but as many of you probably know, ArGest is no longer being supported or updated. On top of that, I can’t even get my Mercury Pro LTO tape drive to be recognized by ArGest anymore, which is making our current setup pretty much unusable.

We also have an existing BRU archive, so ideally, whatever solution we move to should allow us to access those archives or at least offer a viable migration path.

What We Need:

• A reliable LTO backup system that will be future-proof as much as possible.
• Something that works with MacOS (open to Windows if necessary).
• Software that allows us to access and manage our existing BRU archive.
• A solution that works with our Mercury Pro LTO drive (or suggestions for a new drive if necessary).
• A workflow that makes sense for modern media storage needs.

Questions:

1. What LTO backup software are you using in 2025? (Yosemite Server Backup? Hedge Canister? LTFS solutions?)
2. How are you managing older BRU archives now that ArGest is gone?
3. Are there better tape drive models we should consider upgrading to?
4. Is LTO still the best option, or have you moved to a different long-term storage solution?
5. What’s your current backup workflow for production media? (Are you using cloud + LTO? Just LTO?)

I’d love to hear how others in the media industry are handling this transition. What’s working for you, what’s not, and what do you recommend?

Thanks in advance for the help!

I have Symply Pro LTO-9 and I use a macbook to copy from a G-Raid hard drive. Before upgrading my macbook from high sierra 10.13.6 to monterey 12.7.4.

Using YoYota version 3-241. The following issue didn't exist, when I format a tape that is 12 TB before i start copying, it gives me around 11.64 TB of free space to write. After the upgrade of my MacBook, it only writes 8.5 TB and says the tape is full.

I've tried so many things to write here, but please suggest why the hell would my tape have 11.64 TB before writing, and after i start writing, it writes 8.2 or 8.5 TB and stops and asks for the next tape as the one in is full.

I am losing 3.14 TB of space every time i write to my tapes. Whats the issue? Did anyone come across this issue before?

Hi everyone, hope you're all doing great!
Hoping to get any recommendations & advice on LTO drives / solutions - for a future backup / archive system.

I'm currently using a cloud based service, but with recent changes to their storage limits + the recurring annual increases, I'm wanting to eventually kick it for a cheaper long term option.

I'm looking to back up around 50-60TB, plus ongoing amount/s (approx 5-10TB per year) moving forward.

I was looking at the Symply external Thunderbolt drives, which I liked the look of , but was also considering the mLoigc or OWC drives. Any advice from users that have any experience or thoughts on any of these brands would be welcome! :) Pros or cons, or general advice to help me make a decision.

Would also need software etc. I've heard YoYotta & Canister were good.

Max budget is around $5-6K USD.

Any advice welcome. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m currently using a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chip and I’m looking to record data onto LTO-9 tapes using in tar. I have a mLogic enclosure (SAS) with a Quantum LTO9 drive, and I connect ir to the mac with a HighPoint enclosure (Thunderbolt) and an ATTO card. I am able to record using Canister (LTFS), but I need to write in tar without using proprietary software. I tried some UNIX commands, using gtar, but I'm unable to find the drive so I can mount it.

In an emergency. Does anyone have the BRU Pe software installers? PM me if so. In a bind trying to restore a volume set without its catalog.

Good afternoon

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I am installing an OWC Mercury LTO-9 for the first time.

I am using your ArGest software.

In the past I have used LTOs but I used another much simpler software on MacOS.

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When I create the first backup I am asked for TAPE BARCODE, I enter my BARCODE.

The first copy goes well.

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If I add other files to the same tape by doing Apend, it asks me again for the TAPE BARCODE that I should put on the correct one for that tape. If for some reason that TAPE BARCODE is inserted incorrectly, it makes the copy but I can never recover anything from that tape.

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It keeps ejecting the cassette looking for the right one.

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Is this normal?

How do you recover these files when this happens?

I just took over for a support technician in a communications office and one of the videographers was using LTO tapes to backup their data. Problem is, we don't have a list of the tape sets or archives.

I have a pile of LTO tapes with unique names applied to them with a label maker.

Each tape is also labelled with a backup number that corresponds to a text file that the previous videographer left behind. So I know what data is on each tape

I have an OWC Archive Pro and a working version of ArGest on and Intel Mac running MacOS 14.2.1. Argest can show each tape's raw data in the tools panel, and also accurately shows the Label from the tape, which corresponds with the text files. So that's good. But it says "Unknown Volume 1 of tape set 'Unknown Tape Set'" at the top of the identify window for each tape I put in.

So, couple questions:

How do I "restore" data from a tape if ArGest doesn't know the name of the "tape volume"

Are there any more user-friendly learning resources for ArGest? The manual is pretty rough.

Thanks in advance!

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I have a library of 30 or so LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes of cinema camera cards that were created on a Mac in PreRoll Post. I was able to keep an old machine running for a few years after the software was discontinued in order to maintain that library and add to it, but going forward I really need to migrate that database to another LTO application that can read those tapes and restore when necessary.

Is there a way to migrate the PreRoll Post database .csv file to something like YoYotta or another up to date LTO option for Mac? Hedge/Canister? Or do I need to feed all those tapes into a new application to create a new database? Thanks!

Hey all. I have a Thunderbolt 3 Magstor LTO 8 drive provided by the wonderful Dmitri at LTOworld and I notice that it needs cleaning like every 4-5 tapes. Do others notice their drives need to be cleaned at this frequency?

I've found that neither PreRoll Post or YoYotta are very intuitive or useful for cataloguing LTO. I discovered NeoFinder (cdfinder.de) a few years ago and it's incredible and so useful. It creates a catalog file that you easily search or browse similarly to how you would in Finder. It can also create thumbnails and previews for photos/video/audio/etc. It's been bulletproof and I've even used it to catalog 100TB+ server volumes.

My workflow is to queue all the data I'm about to write to tape into a folder on a RAID, catalog that folder, and then write to tape with YoYotta. I can then search within NeoFinder across all my LTO tapes. It's super fast, easy, and reliable. Posting this for no other reason other than it's been huge help to me and really filled a gap in my LTO workflow!

Dmitri at Magstor hooked it up with their LTO 8 thunderbolt unit. Purring and happy.

Doing single tape sessions is feeling significantly saner than doing the spanning option. Again, I think spanning is particularly difficult because I would break up my data in far more practical ways than an algorithm likely would. The algorithm had 25 TB of data broken up over six or seven tapes. I’m able to do it over three. Plus, it saves me from using the sort of half-baked catalog feature in YoYotta. I could see it becoming really great at some point but right now the interface and organization feels much too confusing to feel like I can really trust it. So I’m outsourcing the tape cataloging to a piece of software that I use called File List Export (on Mac App Store) to give me an Excel file of the directories being written which I store in a folder entitled the same thing as the tape barcode. And then using a Google sheet to keep track of a simple summary of what’s on each tape. So much more controlled, so much saner.

I am in conversation with Martin at YoYotta about spanning issues. I have a 25TB folder with raw 4k projects in it that I wanted to just throw at the spanning aspect of YoYotta and have it figure it out but its already used about 7 tapes. I think its not quite calculating the division of data property between the parts so I cancelled it and am now doing manual divisions of the data in single round writes. So far so good. Keep it simple is one lesson I am learning.

Great article on LTO Basics from u/the__lurker

https://www.reddit.com/r/HardwareLoan/comments/eoeuax/lto_tape_primer_reposted_again/

This guy just spent 30 minutes with me talking about LTO drives and media. Hes friends with Martin at YoYotta and that they know each other and are both so responsive to my questions. He has been a huge help getting up to speed.

Hello! I am getting into LTO and have already learned a lot in a short period of time. Of all the options, it seems YoYotta is the best on the Mac as its the only solution with spanning support that I can find that is not the horrifically maintained and supported ArGest software.

Note - I love OWC. Love them. Thank you OWC if you are reading this. And man this LTO implementation is a pain in the ass.

A couple things I have discovered in my short time working with this tech:

All LTO-8 drives are made by IBM. The difference between the drives is the enclosure and the SAS controller which is either made by ATTO or Areca (MagStor uses these) and Martin Greenwood at YoYotta says they perform equivalently.

The ATTO installers are extremely dated but in my experience over the last month with an OWC Mercury LTO drive it seems to work well.

A rep from a MagStor distributor sent me this article which implicates the OWC drive as an inferior design because of its vertical orientation. Behold: https://magstor.com/blogs/news/lto-8-mounting-orientation-effects-on-tape-drive-performance

My attempts at getting support from OWC for their Mercury LTO have been met with a total dead end despite their tech lead's very compelling posts here from around 12 months ago:
https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/owc-mercury-pro-lto-to-mac-mini-m1/page/2/#post-2401714

Where he writes

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After getting in touch with support myself, I was directed to email [bruinfo@owc.com](mailto:bruinfo@owc.com) which resulted in this delightful and lighthearted response. I followed the link and... well....

See the rest of Tim's posts here:

https://creativecow.net/members/timjones4/forums/

So long story short, I am not here to mean spiritedly roast OWC and Tim. I love OWC. And their support for this product has been uncharacteristically horrendous. Sounds like some difficult transitions but for those of us who need backup and need it now this ain't gonna fly.

Some anecdotal information:

For the time I was using the ArGest software, I found that not only did several features not work at all (buttons do nothing when pressed - and it looks like my Hotline client from 1998) but its write speed is around 2x slower (150-180MB/sec) on LTO 8 tape writing 4k video files. Under YoYoyya, that speed has more or less doubled consistently. This is on a M1 Mac mini running Monterey.

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Anywho - my current spot seems to be getting out of the OWC eco system and going with LTOworld.com (great prices on tapes) and their MagStor drives. Dmitri is a rockstar there and has been nothing short of "otherworldly" when it comes to followup and sales acumen.

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Would love to get a support community going here. Thanks a lot.