Saxon

Thanks for responding, Russ. 1) Retrospect estimates tape capacity at 23.5 gb, the drive has hardware compression. 2) Disk capacity of all 7 Macs totals 490gb, BUT Retrospect only looks at 2 particular folders on each Mac - those folders total 19.5gb. 3) Yes, I am aware. So, to my way of thinking, if there’s only 19.5gb of data (before the tape drive even does it’s hardware compression) it should all fit on one tape during a Recycle backup, err, shouldn’t it? :uncertain: PS: Will media timeout shut down the host & client Macs?

Each time my backup script runs a Recycle backup the tape appears to fill up prematurely (doesn't appear to happen on incrementals). When Retrospect prematurely demands a tape change, it leaves all the client Macs on overnight waiting for the next member of the set to be inserted. Typically the Configure/Backup Sets/Members would show only 14.4gb is on the tape – actual backed-up data size (as calculated from the Log) correlates fairly closely. The tape length estimate in Configure/Backup Sets/Options is set to automatic. But in any case I would expect Retrospect to fill up a tape before requesting the next member in the set. Can anyone suggest why this is happening and how to fix it? Retrospect 5.1.7 running on G4 733 MHz Mac with 896mb RAM, backing up a further 6 client G4 Macs to a DDS-3 tape drive (SCSI), over a 1gb Ethernet network, onto 5 “day-of-week” Backup Sets with a staggered Recycle. All Macs running OS 9.2.2 Many thanks in anticipation.