Best practice about backing up large amount of data from off-line HDD

[John Th]

Hi,

We have a large amount of data (digitized books in .PNG format, movies,
sound recordings etc.) stored on a few hundred (off-line) HDDs on
variable sizes. We have also a tape device (HP StorageWorks Ultrium 920)
with 800GB data cartridges and HP Data Protector Express Single Server
Edition (V3.50 sp2 - Build 34497) on a WinXP machine.

We are not very familiar with the program. We want to copy all the data
from HDDs to tapes using the space in the best way and also to have an
easy way of searching/restoring the desired file(s).

We read the manuals and did some (extensive) tests but we didn't find an
optimal solution for our purpose. For example, it's unclear (at least
for me :-) ) how can we span two disks on three cartridge and still see
what's on every cartridge. For ex., we have:

Disk 1: 500 GB
Disk 2: 500 GB

And we want:

Cart 1: 400 GB (from Disk 1)
Cart 2: 100 GB (from Disk 1) + 300 GB (from D2)
Cart 3: 200 GB (from Disk 2)

If we keep the same media name for both disks, the data from Disk 1 from
the last cartridge will be overwritten with data from Disk 2. If we use
different media names then in Media tree we see in the cartridge which
is supposed to hold data from both disks only the data from one disk.
How can we see the media content for all the data and continue in a
consistent manner with Disk 3, 4 aso.?

Any advice regarding the above theme and/or our concrete questions will
be greatly appreciated.

TIA,

m. Th.