PeteGould Posted March 2, 2003 Report Share Posted March 2, 2003 We're a video production company and just purchased Retrospect Pro 6 to back up the video and audio media on our Avid system. We used to use a product made specifically for this purpose (called Mezzo Archiver by Mezzo Technology), but they're Mac-only while our Avid system has migrated to Windows. Besides, their customer support was HORRIBLE, so I'm glad to be rid of them. Our issue is compression and maximizing tape capacity on our Quantum DLT7000, which has an uncompressed capacity of 35GB, 70GB compressed (hardware compression). All Avid video files end in the suffix ".omf" but depending on how they were digitized they may contain uncompressed video or it may be compressed by up to 20:1 (it's a lossy compression). Basically what I'm finding is that under Mezzo, the backups crammed close to the 70GB claimed capacity on each tape, even with heavily compressed video media (presumably because the compression is lossy), while under Retrospect we're only getting around the 35GB claimed as uncompressed capacity. It's as though the compression checkbox was off. I've also tried checking the software compression checkbox in addition to hardware compression with no difference. What's the best way to figure out what's going wrong? Pete Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 2, 2003 Report Share Posted March 2, 2003 Retrospect uses a lossless compression. Most digital video and audio will not compress well. For more info see the compression FAQ. Compression FAQ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeteGould Posted March 4, 2003 Author Report Share Posted March 4, 2003 Well... here's the puzzling thing, though. Under the other software, turning on "hardware compression" really did result in a significant space savings with the same kind of files I now am having trouble with. Tell me this: how can I test whether hardware compression is really being enabled? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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