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Compression


kaikow

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My intention is to backup to Maxtor USB external drives and, maybe, a Seagate SCSI Travan 4 drive.

 

1. For the tape drive, am I better off using hardware compression? I'm concerned about space, not speed. My recollection is that the drive's hardware compression was not as good as the software compression used by BackUp MyPC. Any statistics on using Retrospect with he Seagate Travan 4 drives as far as compression is concerned.

 

2. The USB drives are formatted as NTFS in Windows 2000. Will I get better space use by enabling NTFS compression or by using Retrospect's software compression. In this case, I have not yet decided whether speed or space is more important.

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The FAQ does not answer my questions. Lemme clarify.

 

1. Enabling compression in NTFS is software, not hardware, compression. So if I tell Retrospect I want to use software compression, there needs to be a means to tell Retrospect whether to use the NTFS compression or the Retrospect compression.

 

2. There needs to be away to tell Retrospect to use software compression, even if a device has hardware compression. The FAQ seems to indicate that Retrospect will not use software compression if hardware compression is available. That's not sufficient, the user needs to be able to insist on software compression.

 

It is ONLY the user who can make the correct choice between using hardware or software compression and, if more than one software method, which to use. It is the user who has to make the speed/storage tradeoff decision, not Retrospect.

 

 

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Combinations of compression are not available. Your choices are:

 

 

 

1. No compression

 

2. Software compression

 

3. Hardware compression

 

 

 

To disable hardware compression, which is only available with tape backup sets, you must create a new backup set. Turn off the hardware compression option during creation.

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Quote:

The FAQ does not answer my questions. Lemme clarify.

 

1. Enabling compression in NTFS is software, not hardware, compression. So if I tell Retrospect I want to use software compression, there needs to be a means to tell Retrospect whether to use the NTFS compression or the Retrospect compression.

 


Rerospect does not use the Windows NTFS compression. If software compression is used for your backup, the compression is by Retrospect.

Amy, please let me know if I am wrong... Any files that are on the hard disk with NTFS compression are actually decompressed by the OS before they are passed on to Retrospect for backup. At this point Retrospect will or will not compress them with its own compression routine.

 

John

 

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