Backup Exec 2010 R2 - tape usage best practice

[Symanticus]

Hi All,

I've got LTO-4 tape drive and using BE 2010 R2 running now, in my backup job I've selected a directory which contains 1.1 TB of files that is a backup file from a 3rd party application (already deduplicated), however after long writing time i found out that the LTO-4 tape 1.6 TB is not enough ? it asked for another tape ?

since the difference is not that big, then i insert the LTO-3 tape. would that be ok for the weekly full archive to tape ? using 2 tape in one backup set ? LTO-4 and LTO-3 pair ? 

any kind of help and suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
AWT

[pkh]

When you backup dedup data to tape, the data is hydrated before it is backed up.

There is no problem in having more than 1 tape for a single backup.  I normally try not to mix my LTO3 and LTO4 tapes.   There are differences between the two types of tapes.  For example, LTO4 support hardware encryption whereas LTO3 does not, so I don't know what would happen when the tape is spanned and hardware encryption is used.  Also, the writing speed of the two types of tapes are different.  Before you mix them, I would suggest that you thoroughly test them first, i.e., make sure that you have no problems restoring the data.

[Symanticus]

ah.... no wonder that the data seems to be bigger when it is written to the tape drive.