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TheHelpful1's avatar
13 years ago
Solved

Backup Exec 12 selectively compressing tapes

We have an HP tape loader partitioned for 4 daily backups (one tape each) and one weekly backup (3 tapes). The tapes are LTO-1 with compression and recently the tapes seem to be selectively choosing when to compress the data. Our RAID data to be backed up is 557GB so with the LTO-1 compression, we should be able to back up 600GB, but around 446GB, the third tape is filled up and we get the prompt to "Please insert overwritable media into the robotic library using the import command." and Event ID 58064 is written to the event log. If compression was not working at all, then we should not have been able to write past ~300GB and if the third tape was not taking compression then it should have triggered at 500GB and not 446. I tried changing the Advanced setting from backup following Junction points to Symbolic links but that made no improvement. 

Installed update are SP5, Hot fix 358179, 141388 and 155482. Server OS is 2003 R2 SP2. 

  • I finally got a successful backup 348GB of data for 3 tapes, the last tape having used 84.6GB of 97.9GB. Software compression was used, but as some have suggested, it looks like the tapes themselves are the culprit. If all were compressing like tape 3, I should be able to fit at least 450GB across 3 tapes without any issue. The fact that tape 1 and or tape 2 didn't fill out their max under compression before tape 3 was called seems to be the culprit. I manually totalled up my selection list and it only came to 334GB worth of data so that leaves ~14GB from the system state backup. 

    Tape 1 and 2 have been in rotation for several years, being written to once every 10 weeks for offsite storage so hopefully I can use this as leverage to upgrade our tape loader to an LTO 2 or even 3. This week I'm going to load all brand new tapes for the offsite to test my if using brand new tapes will get me back to the capacity I use to have.