StoreEver Tape Storage
1748181 Members
3439 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Can I use more than one tape drive for Backups

 
David Baltazar
Occasional Contributor

Can I use more than one tape drive for Backups

Our backup has been giving a full messege for a little while. We are using a travan 40 tape drive now. We also have our old tape drive, an HP Surestore dat24. I am wondering if we will be able to use both tape drives for a single backup, this way we won't have to keep switching tapes to get a complete backup. Each week we run 4 daily backups and a weekly backup. Any input would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
-David B
2 REPLIES 2
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: Can I use more than one tape drive for Backups

You can probably utilize both tape drives within the confinds of your backup software, but yo uwill probably not be able to use both for the same job at the same time. Depends on your software.

Perhaps it is time to look into some newer? like an SDLT or LTO drive?


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
rich pattison
Trusted Contributor

Re: Can I use more than one tape drive for Backups

Backup Exec has the facility to configure a "cascaded drive pool" - designed to allow standalone tape drives to act as a higher capacity unit.

A job submitted to this type of pool will use the capacity of one drive, then overflow on to the next. However, it would not be a good idea to mix media and drive types in this kind of arrangement.

As with the previous reply, it sounds like you need an upgrade - maybe a small DDS autochanger would do the trick ?