Unable to get NATIVE capacity of tape.

[HairyMonster]

Hi there

I've seen plenty of questions asking why someone can't get the y GB on an x/y GB tape, so nobody reads previous posts. I bet most people are fed up of answering that question. However, I can't get x on an x/y GB tape.

I'm having a little trouble with ARCserveIT 6.61 Advanced Edition build 885.

I'm unable to get anywhere near the native capacity onto the tape. I'm using a Quantum DLT 4000 (fw. D782) with DLT IV tapes, which should give me a 20/40GB capacity. However, I'm getting less than 16.5GB on the tape, as it's asking for a second one. I believe it's only 100MB or so going onto the second tape.

The detail tab shows that hardware compression is on. Software compression in the job is off.

According to the activity log, 16502.50MB was written to the media, the second tape has 18003MB remaining capacity and the media compression ratio is 3.27. The drive has the following lights on with both tapes: 20GB and Compress

I read a previous post that said drives tend to write in 256K blocks, and if 256K isn't in the buffer, then it's padded with blanks. Is this possibly my problem? How can I tell in ARCserve if so?

 

[HairyMonster]

Please ignore this question - the client had neglected to tell me that there were TWO backup jobs going onto the tape.

After spending hours looking through logs, I finally noticed that the job I was looking at was not formatting the tape.

A total of 30GB is going on the tape which is about right.