Compression Ratio 1

[Animasu]

Hi, I am running Windows Server 2000, and have VERITAS 9.0 installed with a Sony StorStation AIT2 Turbo, I am trying to back up 4 Raid 3 Drives.
The biggest drive that is on here (65.4gb, 44.7gb has been used) mainly has Excel, Word, Access and Powerpoint Documents. The other 3 drives, One is for Email, Internet, User Profiles, and the Backup, One is for Programme Files and SQL Server, and the last one is for Roaming Profiles, Accounts, User Documents (Usually Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, or Images), and Printers.
The disks I use are 80gb Native, and 200gb Compressed, the compression is set for the hardware (if not available then use software) and is set to Overwrite media. After it has recorded about 110GB(It dose vary from 105 - 120GB) it spits the tape out and asks for another one, which then only records around 3-4GB of data then its completed, is there anything I could do to increase the compression ratio so i can fit the remaining files on the tape or is this something that the computer decides?
Hope someone can help
Thanks
-Animasu

 

[steveot]

The tape device perform the compression. Backup Exec just hands off the command. The general rule of thumb is half the difference of the native compression. If you look at sony websute they assume 2.6.1 compression you can achiveve 200 gig with ADLC. This will never happend in the real world unless you backing up pure text files. So lets assume it a 80/160 tape...then getting around 120gigs on a tape would be very good compression. Since your backing up email and SQL these file are already compressed and the tape device wont compresss them any further. Only thing that I could suggest is to update the firmeare and all the drivers. You may be able to fit the 3 gig more onto the tape..but what about 6 months down the road..you will be back to the same spot as your companys data grows.

 

[Animasu]

Thank you steveot for the reply, and the 6 month down the line part you mentioned is a good point, and thanks for pointing this out, it seems i will need a higher capacity backup for the future. I checked out the sony website before hand and i did notice the 2.6:1 compression ratio, so i assumed i could do this with the whole backup, thank you once again
-Animasu