VS 80 DLT Drive Question

[Arp Hiemstra_1]

A customer of ours has a HP external VS80 DLT drive. Attached to a Windows 2000 server connected to a symbios SCSI controller.
He uses Arc Serve 2000 for his backup.

When a backup runs he backups C and D drives, only uppon completion of the C drive Arc Serve asks for the next tape.
Als he indicates in the log that the tape is full. This is not an option because there is only 20Gb of data backuped at this time.

Anybody any ideas as to how to resolve this issue.

Thanks

[CA886084 · Accepted solution]

If you have hardware and software compression both enabled this will inflate file size. Or if you have either software of hardware compression turned on and you are backing up compressed files this will also inflate file size. You might want to have your customer download HP Storage Works Library & Tape Tools and do a compression test - you should get a compression ratio of 2:1 if you don't you might want to have the customer call tech support.

[David Holbrook]

It could be that the tapes you are using will only hold 20 GB, even though the drive is able to record much more. I have also run into a batch of bad DLT IV tapes which would only record a fraction of what they should be able to do. What is the type of tape being used, and is there any indication of any writing problems? Has the drive been cleaned lately?