Backup Exec 2014 backup issues

[vovocals]

Hello Everyone.

I have been battling this issue for more than a week now and i hope i can be provided answers:

I have a tape device HP Storageworks 1/8 2g tape autoloader.

I have a windows server 2012 with backup exec 2014 installed.

Initially i couldn't see the tape on backup exec, until i installed an backup exec updates and changed the medium changer driver from HP  to Microsoft.

My cartridges are not labelled with barcodes.

And i also disabled barcode rules on the robotic library.

i normally insert the barcode on the robotic library

Again am using an LT0-5 cartridges, with 3TB but on backup exec they show up as 1.39TB and 1.39TB

I am trying to back up a server with videos on a folder with  a size of 1TB

I started the backup job and when it gets to 625GB, it started verifying.

Should i be worried? because i was hoping it is suppose to backup the whole 1TB before it starts verifying?

Going forward what advice can you give, if i have poorly designed or deployed this.

NOTE: The reason i haven't used a barcode is because of the lack of any.

[VJware]

LTO-5 tapes have a native capacity of 1.5 TB, so it appears pretty okay in BE (As 1.39 TB). 3TB is the capacity achieved using 2:1 compression which is hardly probable in real-life scenarios.

And if compression is enabled on the backup of the videos folder, disable it and rerun the backup. Check how much data is being backed up.

[vovocals]

Thank u.

so to use the whole 3TB i would need to use a compression ratio of 2:1 ?

how do i do that on backup exec 2014?

[VJware]

As mentioned earlier, 2:1 is almost never achievable in real life. Secondly, we can control if compression is being used or not, however we cannot control the ratio itself.

[vovocals]

so are u saying that we can only make use of the 1.39TB out of a 3TB cartridge.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

You don't have a 3Tb tape. You only have a 1.5Tb tape. The 3Tb figure is a marketing thing which assumes that your data can be compressed to half its size. This is hardly achievable in real life. How much your data can be compressed depends on your data. You cannot force it to compress to a certain ratio

[vovocals]

Thank u.

Next Question.

Backing up a folder on a seperate server with 931GB of video data always fails.

The first tape backup error message  was tape full

The second tape backup, the error was "encontered corrupted file"

None of my backup seems to complete.

is there something i am doing wrong? i am backing up directly to tape. and i manually inserted the barcode on the robotic library during initialization

PS: can i erase the content on the tape so i can reuse it? how do i do this with backup exec?