@nthnu wrote:
It's Server 2003 R2 and BE 2010 R3, and the tape shows as media type LTO (I haven't found an LTO5 specific listing) and shows as 1.5TB.
So if I unchecked "enable compression" on the drive, and on the backup job set "compression type" to none, the tape drive should compress it on its own, right?
I do not remember exactly what the BE 2010 R3 drive properties looked like. But if you UNcheck an option called "enable compression" in the drive properties screen in BE, that sounds to me like you are wanting BE to tell the tape drive to NOT use the drive's own hardware compression engine.
When you set the backup job "compression type" to "none", you are telling the backup job that you do not want the backup data compressed at all. IMHO, this is typically only used for testing or if you have large quantities of some very weird (already compressed) data that actually expands when it is processed by a second compression engine (either hardware or software).
Generally, to obtain compression, you want the drive properties to show that compression is enabled and you want the backup job compression option set to "hardware (if available, otherwise none)". These are the factory defaults settings.
The actual compression ratio achieved by the tape drive mostly depends upon the data being fed to it. By nature, some data is more compressible than others. For example, .zip files are already compressed, so don't expect them to get compressed further when written to tape.
