BE 12.5 compression not working with HP Storage Works DAT160

[Jethro_Penny]

HI There

I saw there was another topic where this was not working with another tape drive but i tried the suggestions there are its not working http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH50960

I have updated the firware on my tape drive. I made sure the backup job has the compression setting of "Hardware otherwise None".

When i run the tracer.exe and i look at the Mode Sense line as the article suggests i dont see the compression switch happening. Im not sure if i am missing something or looking in the wrong place. Here is the bin file if someone can help me please. My backups are not running now because they run out of space.

Here is the bin file link http://www.mediafire.com/?mc2efxjbftxtvhl

Thanks in advance.

Jethro Penny

[CraigV]

Hi Jethro,

What exactly are you backing up? Not all files are capable of being compressed, and some are already compressed, for example jpg and zip files....

You can also select the setting: Hardware, otherwise software. It might place a bit of strain on your server's processes, but it shouldn't be production-stopping...

[Jethro_Penny]

Hi Craig.

I will try changing that setting now and see if that changes at all.

The files im backing up are files created by Veeam Backup which are backups of our databases' Virtual Machine. I will repost once the backup is completed with the setting change.

Thanks

[Ken_Putnam]

The files im backing up are files created by Veeam Backup which are backups of our databases' Virtual Machine.

Sounds like that backup may have compression enabled, so you would get little if any compression out of BackupExec

That  being said, you should still see the compression flag set in the Tracer report, so that is strange

{edit}

Had another thought -

From the devices tab of the BE Console, right click the drive\properties

Is "enable hardware compression" selected?

[teiva-boy]

I think Veeam already compresss the data.  I dont think you would get anything usable here.

Run a traditional backup of a virtual guest using an agent, and see if you get compression, or backup a normal server, or even the BackupExec server itself, and see if you get any compression.

[Jethro_Penny]

Had another thought -

From the devices tab of the BE Console, right click the drive\properties

Is "enable hardware compression" selected?

I did check this and made sure that was on however the backup of the Veeam files still did not compress and i ran out of tape.

I am going to run a backup of our WSUS folders which is 40GB and see if it does indeed compress it at all and will report back.

In the tape config i notice the configuration at the bottom it states that hardware compression is enabled and it has some other settings which are set as follows. Block Size(Per device) 64.0kb, Buffer Size(Per Device) 64.0kb, Buffer Count 10 and High water count 7. Are these standard and correct?

[CraigV]

Veeam compresses and does deduplication at the same time...but doesn't do restores from Exchange/SQL etc currently without restoring everything.

You won't compress it anymore than it is. We have a site that compresses 1TB of VMs into a 200GB file for backup. I haven't seen BE do that, which is a great pity.

[nichotech]

I have BE12.5 SBE on MS 2008 Std server. I am using Dell DAT72 drive. I checked and HDW Compression is Enabled but when I check the properties of the actual 4mm tape from BE console it shows hardware compression support 'No'.

Does this seem correct? The tapes are Dell Dat 36/72.

Thanks

[CraigV]

Hi,

Needs to be a new forum posting so that someone can get the credit for helping find the solution.

Please repost :)