no able to set hardware encryption on lto4 hp ultrium 1840 drive using backup exec12.5

[paulow1978]

Dear all,

I have recently been told to set up encryption on our backups which i duly did last night. As I had no option to set hardware encrytion on my ultrium 1840 drives I set it to software encryption and hardware compression. However the backups never got compressed last night and the backups were missed.

I have read the hp ultrium 1840 specs and it says that it can do hardware encryption. My question therefore is how do i get backup exec to give me the option of setting this and whould the backups compress with hardware copmpression if software encryption is set

thanks,

Paul

[Colin_Weaver]

If you have an LTO4 drive that supports encryption then the option in Backup Exec is via the same drop-down in the job properties that lets you set software encryption.

BTW if you encrypt something before you compress it, then the compression will be very inefficient/ineffective. This is because encryption randomises the data in the file, but compression is looking for similar sequences of data in order to reduce the size - hence with your combination of Software Encryption (done by Backup Exec) and hardware compression I would expect compression not to be able to achieve much.
Best Practices for Software Encryption:
http://support.veritas.com/docs/311713