Require information on backing up to tape

[Andrew86]

Hello, I would appreciate some information about how data is written to tapes in Backup Exec.

Here is a list of our current setup:
10 LTO6 tapes (2.5TB capacity)
22TB of data we want to backup

My questions:

1) If we compress our data into smaller single files e.g (8TB) can we write this data across multiple tapes?

2) How is data written to tapes? Does the backup job first start writing to the first available tape then when full, writes to the next free one in sequence?

3) What happens if we lose a tape in one of our media tapes? Do we lose all the data or can we still restore some of it?

Thanks.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew,

1. Yes, BE will write the files to tape, and when a tape is full, it will span to the next until the job completes (success/fail). If the data on disk is compressed, there will probably be no compression on tape. Also, bear in mind that when creating 8TB data sets on disk, if a file corrupts, you potentially lose 8TB of data.

2. You would have a media set essentially with tapes in that set, and Scratch tapes available for use in any set. BE starts writing to the first tape and fills it, ejects the tape into an available slot, and then pulls in the next available tape for use.

3. You should be able to restore data from the rest of the tapes in the set. There is a setting in BE (can't remember it to be honest), but basically it stops BE from asking for all tapes in order in the set. Alternatively, you should be able to restore from any tape individually as well if required.

Thanks!

[pkh]

You should not compress the files into one file before backing up this compressed file. You should just turn on compression in your job. How much compression you can achieve with you data depends on the type of data that you have.