I am running a trial version of BE 12 and need some guidance please

[taylormade]

The server I'm runnning on does not have a lot of free space. This just isn't fixable immediately.

I set up BE to save to a FILE on the server.

I checked SOFTWARE COMPRESSION.

However the resulting file is not compressing very much

I've got 6 gig to crunch and the file is still coming out to 5 gig or so. 

Should I expect more from compression to a file? What might I have missed?

Thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

compression of 2:1 is marketing hype,  not engineering promise.  Actual compression will vary with data type and content.  Going from 6 GB to 5 GB is ~1.2:1   I generally figure about 1.2 or 1.3 until a particular job has run several times and I can get an average

See http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/199542.htm

[taylormade]

So then Ken.. expecting BE to compress my stuff down to 1.5 gig like it does with WinZIP for example is just not possible?

Shouldn't it get down to at least what other compression programs can do if going to a file?
b

[Ken_Putnam]

Yeah, one would expect something similar, regardless of the compression software

You are saying that you get 6GB of data down to about 1.5 using WINZIP with maximum compression?

Hmmm....

This would require extra work, but if you have the disk space available, you could WINZip the data to a directory and then grab the ZIP file(s) with BackupExec.  'Course this would mean a two step restore whenever you wanted to get some data back, and the tapes would not be able to be used for Disaster Recovery

Also have you tried HW compression?

[taylormade]

ken:
I have not tried hardware compression because I thought that I needed a tape drive or other external device that could provide that "hardware" compression.

Are you saying that I can obtain hardware compression even if I'm sending the backups to a "file" backup?

[Ken_Putnam]

I have not tried hardware compression because I thought that I needed a tape drive or other external device that could provide that "hardware" compression.

you're right. 

if you are writing do disk, you could simply enable compression in the FileSystem, but in all likelyhood won't get much difference in rates

[pfx82]

If compression is enabled, it is directly affected by the data you are backing up. WinZIP has it's own compression algorithms they run to compress data. Backups to a bkf file wont compress and if it does, will compress based on how "compressable" the data actually is.