BE Not writing data more than 300+

[faisal7c]

Hello All,

I have symantec exec 12.5 updated all the patches,

i am using HP 7973A (800GB) tape to take backup,

My problem is always the BE asking to incert another tape to complete the job,

The total data stored in the current tape is less than 400Gb and it has free space of another 400gb,

Please hel me why this happend? and what i need to check for the same?

[itsmeaffinity]

Hi ,

Can you please let me know what is the meida set properties for overwrite protection & append

Also have this worked ever

Thank You

[faisal7c]

Hello,

overwrite protection is 1hour and append- allow append infinity

[pkh]

On the media tab, click on the tape and post a screenshot of the tape statistics in the lower window.

[itsmeaffinity]

Hi ,

So  Overwrite protection is 1 hour now can you also confirm in tool-option -media management --which check box is selected one with none or one with partial

Also what is total amount data you backup everyday

& also do you wish to overwrite the job everyday?

if that is the case please run quick erase & run the job should work fine

Thank You

[CraigV]

Hi faisal,

You're not necessarily going to get 800GB on that tape. That assumes a best effort 2:1 compression ration that hardly happens in the real world unfortunately.

Can you confirm that you're using the Symantec drivers and that the latest drivers are installed too?

Thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

Is your tape device an LTO?

There have  been several reports, going  back to v11 of BackupExec using less than the native capacity (no compression) on LTO drives

There has been no official solution provided by Vertitas/Symantec, but a work-round offered was to initialize the tapes using the manufacturer's utility rather than labeling them in BackupExec

[faisal7c]

My data is more than 500 GB, and if 800 gb is avilable it shoud write the same?

Please see the attached screen shots

Thanks

[itsmeaffinity]

Hi

Can you also show alert tab snap which has snap for active alert specially to see what exact alert you are getting & also if possible what are the events in application tab of event viewer

Waiting for your next update

Thank You

[faisal7c]

Please this too, show media full

[Ken_Putnam]

The capacity of your tapes is 800GB COMPRESSED at 2:1, (something you will rarely - if ever - ever see in the real world) and 400 GB uncompressed.  I generally figure about 1.2-1.3:1 as rule of thumb, so you should be able to get around 500 GB on a tape

If you are getting less than 400, then there is a problem somewhere.  As I mentioned above, we have seen numerous reports of less than native capacity with BE and LTO drives.  Try using the manufacturer's utility to reinitialize a tape and see what happens

(remember that when you do this, all the data on the tape becomes inaccessible, so only do it just before the tape is due to be reused) 

[faisal7c]

any update?

[pkh · Accepted solution]

Your compression ratio is 1:1 which means that you are either not using compression or your data cannot be compressed.  This means that you only get the 400GB of native capacity on your tape and not 800GB which signifies a 2:1 compression ratio.

[itsmeaffinity]

Hi ,

Faisal just to add on sam what pkh has said I think to it is an issue with compression which is not working to the mark so in that case please contact h/w vendor to check out with there tools-so that they can confirm if copression is working or not

Because with backupexec you can only enable compression in backup job & it is tape unit which is full responsible for doing compression backup exec only send the scsi command that compression is used 

Thank You

[CraigV]

faisal: if you have an HP drive, download HP Tape & Library Tools.

It has a test there that tests compression. You need a tape that you can erase before running the test.