Compression issues with Ultrium 960

[digex]

We currently have 3 LTO3 HP Ultrium960 tape drives. 2 of them are compressing data that is backed up fine. The other is not compressing the data at all. The HP vendor said that you cannot compress .pdf files. How is this the case? If I zip the .pdf files it compresses it fine but the backup software will not? I do not see any enable hardware compression on the physical tape drive. We are using Arcserve 11.5 SP3.

 

[Cyklops]

In the ARCserve activity log there should be entries about the "media compression ratio". If available, what do they say ??

regards

 

[digex]

Yes it says Media Compression: 1.00. It is on in Arcserve except I cannot determine if its hardware enabled. Or if .pdf files are not able to be compressed.

 

[davidmichel]

hardware compression is enabled/disabled via the software.

check ARCserve Device window with a tape loaded select the drive or tape and ck details if it reports compression enabled then it is enabled at the hardware level.

What HP says does not make sense, if your zip program can compress the files then the tape drive should also be able to.

Check the firmware revision of the tape drive to see if it matches the others, if not update it. Firmware version is seen at the Device window as mentioned above.