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Tape Capacity Exceeded When It Shouldn't Be

Star1
Level 2

Hi,

Having an issue with Backup Exec 15 where the backup job is exceeding tape capacity, but I don't know why.

Each week we have a full backup of our data and system states. As shown in the attachments, this comes to about 4.85TB of space required.

I have 4 LTO5 tapes in the unit allocated. These have a base capacity of 5.52TB with no compression.

Yet, when the job runs it completely fills those tapes and I have to routinely add another spare tape into the mix, an LTO4. Even that almost gets filled up.

Even without compression (which also isn't happening but I can't explain why) I should have more than enough space on the 4 x LTO5 tapes, yet it fills them up and still needs more.

I should also mention, the tapes are put into scratch state before the job starts, there is no appending, only overwrite of blank tapes.

Can anyone suggest why this might be happening or what I can do to troubleshoot? I receive no relevent errors or warnings which would explain this.

Thank you.

2 REPLIES 2

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

Hi,

If data on disk is encrypted it can lead to compression not working. Similarily, if data on disk is already compressed, backing it up with compression is known to end up with that data being decompressed.

You need to check what type of data you're backing up and go from there.

Thanks!

Hi there,

The data and the tapes are not encrypted, I can confirm that. There may be an SQL server whose databases are encrypted, but nothing beyond that.

Regardless of the compression or encryption I should have more than enough space on the tapes even though nothing is compressed, yet I'm getting a massive overrun.

Any idea what might cause this?