How Flare Department Built Their LTO Tape Archive for Video Production
Flare Department creates high-end architecture and interiors content — and with a team of 10 shooting constantly, they needed a reliable LTO tape archive for video production that wouldn’t cost a fortune. They were generating terabytes of footage every month, and storage costs were becoming a real problem.
Cloud storage was the obvious first option, but the numbers didn’t stack up. With hundreds of terabytes in archive, the monthly bill was running into thousands of euros. Spinning disk hard drives were cheaper, but reliability over long storage periods was a genuine concern. SSDs were reliable, but far too expensive at that kind of scale.
So Bas went looking for something better — and landed on LTO.
Why LTO Tape Archive Made Sense for a Video Production Company
LTO-9 tape holds 18TB of native data per cartridge, and when you start doing the maths on cost per terabyte, it becomes one of the most affordable archive options available. More importantly for Flare Dept, it’s a physical medium they own outright. No monthly fees. No subscription. No dependency on a third-party service.
There’s another benefit Flare Dept hadn’t fully considered until he was up and running: air-gap security. LTO tape lives outside a drive for most of its life, completely disconnected from any network. In an era of increasing cyber threats, having a hard copy of your entire archive that can’t be touched remotely is genuinely valuable.
The Setup
For the drive itself, Flare Department chose the SymplyPRO XTH — a clean, straightforward desktop solution with room for a second drive if workload demands it. Paired with Hedge Canister software, archiving footage to tape is as simple as dragging and dropping files, just like any other hard drive.
The decision has already paid off. Clients coming back three years later asking for a recut? No problem — every frame is still there.