Utilize 2 tape drives for one backup job...

[Kingsley_Mok]

We have a PowerVault TL 4000 with dual LTO-4 tape drives.

Currently, Backup Exec (in all version) does not have the capability to utilize two tape drives in one backup job.

You will have to split the backup job.

It would be nice if Backup Exec can utilize two tape drives for one backup job.

[Ken_Putnam]

Do you mean write to two drives at the same time?  Used to be an add-on called RaidDirector that would do this, but it disappeard with v9.0   One of the draw-backs was that if you striped to 3 drives, and any one of the tapes went bad, none of the data was recoverable.

Might want to add this to the v12 Enhancements area, also, since I doubt that they will make that big a change to a back-level version.

[Kingsley_Mok]

Ken,

Yes.  Similar to SATA RAID in array.

Except, it will not backup to tape in RAID array.  Instead.  If you have one backup job with 10 resources that are file servers, SQL Servers, and Exchange.

It would be nice that BE can automatically and intelligently assign the resource to which ever one of the two tapes becomes available during a backup in that one backup job.

Currently, I would have to split the job and assign each job to each tape drive so that all 3.2 TB can be finished within 20 hours or less.

Traditionally, one backup job with 3.2TB worth of data for LTO-2 tape drive will take about 50 to 60 hours, and with LTO-4 tape drive, 37 hours or so....

But because we have dual LTO-4 tape drives, it would be faster to backup data in utilizing both drives.

[Ken_Putnam]

Yeah,

The only way to do it currently is to split your data into as many chunks as you have tape drives, then create that many jobs.  you don' t have to point them to specifc drives or partitions, but you can if you want