No Hardware Compression with EZ17 & Mammoth 1

[awayman]

I'm running BackcupExec 10, and I'm only getting 1:1 compression on the tapes in my Exabyte EZ17 drive with a Mammoth drive. (Note that it isn't a Mammoth 2; this is an older unit.) I'm using Exabyte brand 170m 8mm AME tapes, and the "Enable Compression" box is checked on the configuration tab in BackupExec.

The only thing I'm actually dumping to tape are the BackupExec backup files from a backup-to-disk folder on my backup server. Winzip can compress these files to about half the size they are on disk, so shouldn't the Mammoth hardware compression be able to acheive the rated 2:1 compression with the same files?

TIA.

 

[steveot]

The bkf file should be compressed but if your job is setup to use hardware compression then all backup exec does is pass of the command to the tape device. The tape drive does the compression. So make sure you are using veritas tape drivers, make sure all the firmware is up to date, etc. Have you ran a backup of something besides the bkf file? Have you tried using a duplicate job instead?

 

[awayman]

I haven't checked the firmware yet; I tend to have bad luck with firmware updates, so I usually do that later in the troubleshooting process.

Hadn't thought to try re-creating the job; might be interesting to see if that does anything.

I did resolve my issue (for now, anyway) by changing the compression setting for the job from "Hardware, otherwise none" to "Hardware, otherwise software." That got my stuff backed up with a tape and a half to spare. I'm still curious why I only got 1:1 with hardware compression, but if software does it for me, then I'll call it good for now.

Thanks for the help!