jallman Posted July 28, 2003 Report Share Posted July 28, 2003 I have read thru alot of the support articles, and am wondering if anyone has run into a similar situation before I tell my boss that for some reason the third tape in our backup set is getting 40% less usage than the first 2. I understand that tape capacity is sometimes variable, but I think this case is a bit extreme. Every night, i run a regular file backup to a tape set, then I run a Transfer job which transfers the contents of disk backup sets (about 7 of them) to tape. This whole process uses 4 35/70 DLT Tapes. The first 2 both get close to 52GB on them. The third is getting 30, and then is overlapping to a 4th tape and only using about 2GB of it. Is it possible with a transfer job that it maybe has to fit the entire contents of a file backup set on 1 tape or something? Would it be better if I ran a regular backup job instead of first backing my servers up to disk and then transferring those backup sets to tape? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted July 29, 2003 Report Share Posted July 29, 2003 Hi, This may be a dumb question but have you tried a different set of tapes? It is a bit of a long shot but... You are probably using hardware compression on your tape drive backup sets. It is possible that the data that gets sent to tape #3 and #4 may contain a large number of files that are already compressed -jpg, MP3 etc. Compressing compressed files can actually make them grow. Maybe what you are seeing is an extreme case of that phenomenon? I would try making a new tape backup set and turning off hardware compression when you create the set. (This is your only chance to turn of hardware compression on a set. You can't change it once it has been created) Then I would try the transfer again using this new set with new tapes. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jallman Posted July 29, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 29, 2003 I use a different set of tapes every day of the week, and am seeing this happen with all the sets. It is possible its backing up perhaps our graphics design items, however its difficult to tell what is on the the third tape, i am unaware of a way to list items on a specific tape, just on an entire backup set, which contains all 4 of the tapes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 Hi, It is kind of a hack but you can try this: go to configure/ backup sets and set the last 2 members of the set as "missing". Then set up a backup of the system as usual but be sure to click on the preview button. Anything that was on the 3rd and 4th tape should NOT have a diamond next to it in the browser, meaning it needs to be backed up. I'm sure there are other ways to do this too Hope that makes sense Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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