Backup Exec compression issues

[stablewill]

Hoping somebody can help with this.

A few months ago our backups stopped fitting on one tape as the compression ratios dropped down to very little out of nowhere.

We've been struggling along with using two tapes - but i need to get this sorted.   HP have helped me in as much as they have confirmed that the tape drive hardware is working perfectly - we ran loads of their tests. (HP L&TT)

I had been using backup exec 2010 - but yesterday in an act of desperation i uninstalled it and put the 60 day trial of 2014 on.   I have the same issues.   A compression ratio of 1.13:1...       i.e really poor.   This is ratio is from running a test of 5GB local folder containing office documents, pdfs, drawings, photos etc.   I have an almost identical setup on another site that backs up similar sets of data and it gets 2:1

2014 is pretty different to the 2010 version - but as far as i can see compression is switched on etc

Can anybody give me some pointers as to what might be going on here?

cheers

SW

[ZeRoC00L]

Compression depends on the type of data you are trying to backup. Already compressed files, like PDF, photos, mp3, video are not compressable by the backup.

In orther words, there is almost nothing you can do to get the data more compressed.

[stablewill]

understood ZeRoC00L   - however at least 50% of the files in this 5GB test folder are MS Office documents.

[CraigV]

...you can test this by creating a very large text file and running a backup on it. Check the results, and post back.

Thanks!

[pkh]

Office documents can have embedded graphics which are already compressed and will not compress further. Also, they might be encrypted which makes for poor compression Your compression ratio is not the best but pretty decent. You would seldom get a 2:1 compression ratio

[ZeRoC00L]

Copy the 5GB of data from your second server to this server, run a backup and check if you see any difference in compression

You can also check the other way, copy the 'test' data to the second server and run a backup on it.

[stablewill]

thanks all for your logical responses..   i'll get to work on these and report back

cheers!