No Compression!

[dph]

Our office has had Arcserve V9.0 for several months. Since I've been involved with the network activities, it has never worked seamlessly. We have 25 to 30 Gigs of information to backup and cannot write it to one disk. We are using an HP C5685 tape drive and DDS4 20/40gig HP tapes. After installing and reinstalling replacement drives that HP sent me, I pruchased and installed a second SCSI controller card, Adaptec 29160. The tape drive is the only SCSI device on the Adaptec and the settings on the tape drive is set for hardware compression. Recent backup attempts still show no sign of compressing data and the tape is ejected with a message asking for blank media. Someone mentioned that I should uninstall the driver for the tape drive and install the driver that came with Brighstor. Any thoughts?

Also, during conversation with Brightstor tech support, I was told to run the second erase option, quick erase - media name and serial number, if the software has a hard time recognizing the media.

 

[JPCPB]

Greetings,

It may be this article or similar to which the CA techie was referring:

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/NASNT462.html

Kindest regards,

James

 

[MF2]

DPH:

I had the same problems that you describe, but worked it out. See the FAQ I wrote 861-4375. It is in the FAQ area for this forum.

 

[SamelCamel]

Hi. I'm new to this forum, but I will offer you my opinions. I believe you cannot use hardware AND software compression at the same time. If you have hardware compression turned on from the tape drive, then that should do it. You cannot ALSO check "software" compression from within the backup software, it will not work. I would take a look at the type of data you're backing up. Keep in mind, data that is already compressed cannot be "re-compressed." A few examples of data that cannot be recompressed would be: MDB files, MP3's, etc. An example of a file that has the ability to be highly compressed would be an Excel file.

Give us more details and best of luck!

smarsh@megasysinc.com

 

[dph]

Thanks for the info. As for the FAQ, I read it and printed it for reference. Looks like a lot of good info. We have a very small network so I have people back up their files to the server and then ARCSERVE backs up from both the server and a snap server. The snap server has UNIX/IRIX type files that is frequently copied over from an SGI. Those files are from a modeling program, maybe they do not compress well. The modeling program we use is very antiquated, about ten years old. We also have an abundance of Autocad files, zip files, and JPEG files. Looks like I have my work cut out for me. I may have to survey the office and archive files that have and will not be accessed, then I can omit them from the routine back up.

 

[mrtoledo]

ZIP files and JPEG files are already in a compressed form and will not compress further. Autocad DWG files do compress rather well though.

 

[davidmichel]

See How does ARCserve control compression? faq478-4399 for my thoughts on how ARCserve handles compression and what can effect the rate of compression.

You mentioned not loading the OS drivers see Which Driver Should I Use? faq478-3987 details on that.

Your idea of archiving data off is a good one and this might help:
Bring up ARCserve
Go to Utilities Count
Add a filter Files Accessed Before.
It can be set for Days, Months, Years.
Next under Options go to Log and set it to log all activity.

When the job is done you will have a job log listing all file that have not been accessed within the specified time.