Tape Management and Drive Question

[webstorm]

I am responsible for a 100 GB of storage on an NT 4.0 server. We run the standard GFS scheme for our backups. The backups go to a ADIC 8000 (max 70 GB compressed) tape drive.
I have two questions.
1. Will the GFS scheme allow me to append to my daily differentials on the 70 GB tapes? The reason I ask that is because we currently are backing up nightly 1.5 GB up to 10-12 GB for the night before the Full backup. I have always wondered if I could keep a "Daily" tape that will contain multiple differential backups from sequential weeks.
Will ARcserve allow me to keep multiple session on one tape? This way, I can then use same number of tapes for the GFS scheme, yet I will be able to recover a file for any day of the preceding month.

2. Does anyone know what is better, hardware compression performed by the ADIC tape machine or the software compression that can be enabled with Arcserve? Right now hardware compression is enabled and we can get a compression rate of 1.4 . Can I get better compression via software?
thanks in advance for the assistance

Joe

 

[Guest_imported]

You can very well set the GFS job to append to media for the daily backups by modifying the job and going to backup manager - schedule - use rotation scheme - append option selected in it and then before you submit the job save it choosing the save option in the submit job window .
Mind you once you modify this job on a weekday , it will turn up to be a full backup on that day so request you to do this on Friday full if you cannot afford to run a full backup on a weekday !!!
Regarding the second question Hardware compression is always better than the Software compression and suggested If there is an option in the tape drive to set the hardware compression ON .

 

[Guest_imported]

You can very well set the GFS job to append to media for the daily backups by modifying the job and going to backup manager - schedule - use rotation scheme - append option selected in it and then before you submit the job save it choosing the save option in the submit job window .
Mind you once you modify this job on a weekday , it will turn up to be a full backup on that day so request you to do this on Friday full if you cannot afford to run a full backup on a weekday !!!
Regarding the second question Hardware compression is always better than the Software compression and suggested If there is an option in the tape drive to set the hardware compression ON .