Enable compression in HP Ultrium 1-SCSI LTO-1 tape drive??

[Tom Lyczko]

We are having problems with Backup Exec, and one possible reason is that compression may not be enabled in this tape drive.

How do I get into any sort of configuration for this tape drive to turn on compression if necessary??

I always thought it was on but with our recent BEWS problems, I need to verify how the Ultrium is set up.

We are on BEWS 12.0, most current patches etc.

Thank you, Tom

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

> We are having problems with Backup Exec

What problems exactly ?

Compression is configured through the software that controls the drive, in your case Backup Exec. I've not used version 12.0, but I'd expect it to be fairly easy to find.

Cheers,

Rob

[Tom Lyczko]

I do have compression turned on in BEWS, I found that.

BEWS' option for compression is 'Hardware if available, otherwise software' and I haven't found a way to verify if anything is really being compressed or not...I do not like BEWS.

Thank you, Tom

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

What sort of data are you trying to back up ?

Remember that neither hardware or software compression can compress files that are already compressed.

Cheers,

Rob

[Tom Lyczko]

Just the usual stuff -- files, programs, etc.
We always used to get more than 100 GB into an LTO-1 tape which is why I always thought compression was working before but BEWS is now insistently prematurely cancelling its backups and Symantec has not yet been able to help me figure out why, and we got to wondering about compression, because the BEWS logs only acknowledge that compression is configurable.

I guess there is no way to actually get into the Ultrium per se and configure it.

Thank you, Tom

[WQC]

Hi !

Does your issue solved already ?

Actually, we have the same hardware & software platform. We can set the BEWS compression type on the backup job properties under settings->general.
Mine, I choose "Hardware (if available, otherwise software)"....it works well.

But recently, I have an issue also.

I have 2 tape drives with the same model HP Ultrium 1-SCSI LTO-1. But I was only using 1 tape drive for 2 years. And later on, I decided to use the 2nd tape drive for my tape backup duplication which is working well for almost 2 years now.

Normally, data backups will fit only to 1 tape cartridge into the 1st tape drive and will auto duplicate to tape drive 2. But recently, tape drive 1 will ask another tape cartridge, so I am presuming that data will not fit now into 1 tape cartridge. But I just tried to swap the backup properties to use the tape drive 2 which does not ask for anoter tape cartridge. So I think something wrong with my tape drive 1 compression mechanism....

So I also stop the auto duplication and did it manually from tape drive 1 to tape drive 2. Because if I will do auto duplication from tape drive 2 to tape drive 1, it will also ask another tape cartridge....So really something wrong with my tape drive 1.

Does anybody have idea on my issue above ?

Appreciate much your sharing.

Tks a lot.
Walter