Backing Up Deduplication Store to Tape - Job Rate Issue

[sqmmji]

We have a backup job that runs nightly backing up data to a deduplciation store.  The dedupe store is located on a local drive on our backup server.

This job runs very well but a few hours later we start another backup job that backs up the dedupe store to tape.  To do this we are selecting:

Shadow Copy Components\User Data\Backup Exec Deduplication Store

The job starts out well and 4 hours later has backed up approx 650GB of the 680GB selected data.  Job rate starts to fall to a point where the job would take many hours to complete.  We have Software Compression turned on for the job but I will be switching that off for tonight's job to see if it makes a difference.  Each night we run a Full backup to tape.  The tapes are 800GB DLT S4 and the version of Backup Exec is 2010 R3.

We have performed data->tape backups with these tapes on this installation and not had an issue.  Are there any settings to consider when performing a tape backup of a deduplication store?

Thanks,

[teiva-boy]

Def don't use software compression, only hardware.  Other than that, you can play with block and buffer settings in the tape drive properties, and to defrag your disk regularly.  Other than that, the achillies heel of dedupe, is reassembling the data back to its original format (at least with Symantec they have issues here)