Nothing newer than 7.7 can see Avid ISIS shared drives... help?

[rogerwilcoprod]

We're a video production company and I'm trying to figure out why no version of Retrospect later than 7.7 can see the drives on our Avid ISIS server (running version 3.1.x with the ISIS client running 3.1.0.x).

 

The reason for this is that we now have the option to deliver our show masters on LTO, but only using LTFS which we can't do with 7.7 and I don't think you can have 7.7 and another version installed at the same time (although if I'm wrong, please do correct me). I know our LTO drive can write LTFS, but when we've tried to install a newer version of Retrospect it no longer sees the drive shares that 7.7 sees.

 

I know this is probably a really obscure topic and I am well aware that our server is not running the latest and greatest version of ISIS, but that's due to the ridiculous cost (something like $18k) to get it upgraded, plus we'd have to upgrade our edit systems, it'd just be a whole thing and we can't do it right now as we're in the middle of post on a show and are on a tight delivery schedule. Plus, our setup (server, edit systems, backup computer with Retrospect) seems to get very finicky whenever we change something so I'm hoping there is a way to write to LTFS, ideally using Retrospect, but not have to upgrade anything else in the whole network.

 

If anyone has any advice, ideas, thoughts, suggestions, etc, I would be very, very grateful.

[Scillonian]

From the 'Volumes Database', if you click 'My Network...' then 'Advanced...' and enter the location of the share in the //<servername>/<sharename> or //<server.ip.address>/<sharename> format, does it add the share to the database or do you get an error?

[jotrago]

We had a discussion on LTFS a while back, this may shed some light

http://forums.retrospect.com/index.php?/topic/152013-writing-an-ltfs-lto-tape/

 

In terms of having Retrospect write to an LTFS File system, this is not recommended for Retrospect Backup Sets, but  using the Duplicate function, which simply copies files from one place to another, to copy files to an LTFS file system IS supported on Retrospect 8 & later. See above discussion for details.

[rogerwilcoprod]

From the 'Volumes Database', if you click 'My Network...' then 'Advanced...' and enter the location of the share in the //<servername>/<sharename> or //<server.ip.address>/<sharename> format, does it add the share to the database or do you get an error?

The thing is, we have 7.7 installed now and I have been hesitant to upgrade because we're in the middle of backing some things up (of course it had to be when I need to figure this all out), but I don't know what might have changed between 7.7 and any later version that would affect the software's ability to see the shared drives. I mean, I wouldn't think anything would change that because I assume it's accessing everything on a system level and Windows has no problem seeing the drives, but the guy who configured the system (I wasn't around for that, unfortunately) claimed that version 8 wasn't able to see them (something to that effect).

 

We had a discussion on LTFS a while back, this may shed some light

http://forums.retrospect.com/index.php?/topic/152013-writing-an-ltfs-lto-tape/

 

In terms of having Retrospect write to an LTFS File system, this is not recommended for Retrospect Backup Sets, but  using the Duplicate function, which simply copies files from one place to another, to copy files to an LTFS file system IS supported on Retrospect 8 & later. See above discussion for details.

Thanks for the link, I will take a look at that. The reason I am hoping to use LTFS isn't for backup sets but actually to just copy files onto the LTO tape in a specific folder structure to use in delivering a show to a network that recently began accepting delivery using LTO/LTFS.

[jotrago]

Just another point, you don't say how many LTO drives you have, but I suspect that if the system hosting the LTO Drive has the LTFS Drivers loaded to make the LTO appear in the file system, then you probably will not be able to use that drive for Retrospect Tape backups.

I would imagine that an LTO drive is mounted EITHER as a conventional Tape Drive, OR and an LTFS. but NOT BOTH

[rogerwilcoprod]

Our current LTO drive is setup as a conventional tape drive, although looking at it from a budgetary point of view it might make sense now to get the EzPrep bundle from 1Beyond since it should come in slightly cheaper over the course of a single season of the show so that's what we may end up doing.

 

I do not currently have LTFS drivers installed for the drive we already have (I take it that's a good thing?) so this will be my first foray into the world of LTFS.

[Scillonian]

At a networking level I'm not aware of any reason Retrospect 8 or later should not be able to 'see' the Avid ISIS server. The only real way to find out is to try a later version. If you have a spare system on which you could install the trial version of Retrospect 11 you could see how it interacts with the ISIS server without affecting your backup server's operations.

[rogerwilcoprod]

At a networking level I'm not aware of any reason Retrospect 8 or later should not be able to 'see' the Avid ISIS server. The only real way to find out is to try a later version. If you have a spare system on which you could install the trial version of Retrospect 11 you could see how it interacts with the ISIS server without affecting your backup server's operations.

 

That's what I would think too, that there shouldn't be any reason it wouldn't see the network shared drives. The only issue right now is that I don't have a spare system at this moment, but I will actually have one soon so I should be able to test this out by the middle of next week at the latest.

 

I'm thinking maybe when whoever set up the system in the first place tried version 8 of Retrospect they had some issue with it, but maybe it was a bug in an early version of it that was fixed (maybe it affected more than just ISIS servers, but that's the only server we use Retrospect with), but no one realized that because no one bothered trying to upgrade to the newer version.

 

I dunno. But the good news we'll have another system that can handle LTFS on its own by the end of the week, without using Retrospect, and then sometime next week I'll see what happens when I try installing the demo of the latest version of Retrospect and, if anything goes wrong I'll just uninstall it and reinstall 7.7.

[Scillonian]

Just because a network share can't be 'seen' in Retrospect when you try browsing to it does not mean that Retrospect can't access it. You need to use 'Adanced...' and the UNC path.

 

Quite often my NAS is invisible in Retrospect's browse dialogs. To access the shares on the NAS I have to us 'Advanced...' and the UNC path.

[rogerwilcoprod]

Just because a network share can't be 'seen' in Retrospect when you try browsing to it does not mean that Retrospect can't access it. You need to use 'Adanced...' and the UNC path.

 

Quite often my NAS is invisible in Retrospect's browse dialogs. To access the shares on the NAS I have to us 'Advanced...' and the UNC path.

 

That's a very good point and all of this is making me start to wonder just how much the guy who set up this whole system really knew about Retrospect and Avid ISIS and how they work together... Regardless, I'll try to remember to update this once our new system is here and set up in the hope that it might help someone else in this situation.

 

With any luck it'll work just fine and I'll have ended up wasting my time with this.... Well, I guess it's not wasting time, but at least I'll have some answers.