Streaming or not?

[Andre_19]

Might be a stupid questions. But how can I say if my tape is streaming or not during a backup job? Is it only a question of how long it takes and how much data there is or is there some tool, that shows me this kind of information.
The background of this question is, that I would like to run performance tests and based on this do finetuning.
Thanx
Andre

[Dirk Wiedemann · Accepted solution]

Hello Andre,

you can notice it on a few symptoms:
Most drives indicate the writing with an optical signal, e.g. a blinking LED or so. if it is blinking uninterrupted for the whole time of backup, your tape is streaming.
sometimes you can here it too. If the drive often stops, start again, maiby rewind a little bit or so, it's not streaming.
Streaming is important because:
if your drive stops in case of interrupted data transport, than rewind, starts again and so on, the backup time is much more longer.
if your drive doesn't stop in case of interrupted data transport (blinking stops but drive doesn't), the drive writes nothing or blanks or so on your tape and waste tape resources.
Dirk