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LTO 3 Tape Libray Compression Issues

 
Leroy19
Occasional Visitor

LTO 3 Tape Libray Compression Issues

Hello,

We have been using Symantec Backup Exec 2012 with an LTO 3 MSL G3 Series 24 Slot Tape Library (SCSI) on a Windows 2003 64bit Server..  Everything use to work great until about six months ago when our backups started going to two tapes.  We only have around 650GB of data we backup so it should fit on one tape via compression. 

 

We have noticed that compression is now 1:1 and we do have hardware compression turned on on all our jobs.  The firmware has been updated on our tape drive and all updates are present with backup exec.  The only thing we can think of is that we purchased new HP LTO 3 tapes.  We believe the issue is with the tapes.

 

Does anyone else have this same issue?

2 REPLIES 2
Dennis Handly
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: LTO 3 Tape Library Compression Issues

Compression ratios highly depends on the data you are compressing.  Are you now backing up data (JPG) that is already compressed?

Leroy19
Occasional Visitor

Re: LTO 3 Tape Library Compression Issues

We are backing up our entire network which consits of two SQL severs, Exchange, file server and other servers.  We have been using this drive with Symantec Backup Exec for the last four years without issue.  Our normal ratios were around 1:1.5.   As far as I know nothing is already compressed before it is sent to tape.  I have looked at other forums and found out that other users are having issues with the new HP LTO3 tapes.  If this is true HP needs to look into this issue because it is very inconvenient to deal with two tapes per backup.  Also we are running out of appendable tapes because it uses so much.