Tapes not filling up

[reneedittmer]

I have a question regarding my tape backups. It seems that Veeam is only writing about 2 Gb to a 5.5 Gb tape before moving to the next one. Is there a way to set it up so that it uses the entire tape? It seems like there is a lot of waste going on here.

thanks

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Renee,

What is your tape LTO generation? It might be an expected behavior, as it is common to see "5.5 capacity" labeled on tape cartridge that typically has small font * below with something like "Capacity is measured with 2:1 compression", which means if Veeam Backup tries to write already compressed data(backup) to tape, we will use actual tape capacity, which is twice under labeled one.

/Thanks!

[reneedittmer]

Correction...I meant to seay 5.5 Tb. They are LTO-7 tapes

[Egor Yakovlev]

LTO7 should have around 6TB native capacity.
- are those fresh tapes or was in use by other (backup) solutions?
- what capacity is reported by native tape tools?
- it is worth running a full format of those tapes using native tape tools as sometimes leftover traces from previous use might lead to a misguided available space record

/Cheers!

[reneedittmer]

These are fresh tapes.

[Egor Yakovlev]

And what is reported in Veeam UI for Tape Capacity(right click - properties) and from library's native Tape Tools software?

[reneedittmer]

Veeam reports that the tape capacity is 5.5 Tb. I don't know how to check the capacity from the library as it is not connected to the network.

[soncscy]

Hey Renee,

I suspect this is more your media pool settings. What do you have set for the media set creation on the media pool? New media sets require a new tape, and further more, there are a few "gotcha" activities that force a new media set.

Check that out first, as this sounds like a media pool configuration issue.

On the rare chance it's not and just the job writes 2 TB-ish and then needs a new tape, try a test with your drive vendor's tools to do a full write. I suspect you'll see the same.

[Dima P.]

Harvey is right. Please check if you are using parallel processing to multiple tape drives (that should be a part of media pool properties).

[reneedittmer]

I do not have parallel processing turned on. Also in Media Set settings it is selected to not create new media set for each backup session.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Please update tape drivers to the latest and check full tape write with native tape tools appropriate for your library(like one for HPE or IBM).
/Thanks!

[Unreliably-Recurring]

I had (and kind of still do have) this same problem (Case #04395877 in-progress).
It was back to normal for a week or two, but this week has reverted a little. I'm working on a reply for that Case.

Anyway, the solution for me, for the most part, appears to have been

1. Creating a replacement Media Pool, and assigning all of the free tapes to the new one, and maybe also
2. Creating a replacement job and setting the new job to use it.

Because they were both done at the same time for expediency, I don't know which actually fixed it or if both were needed.

With the mew Media Pool, of course, each tape must be assigned as they return from off-site for re-use until they're all in the new Pool.

The tape usage worked correctly in 6.7x(?), and I think v10 also, but definitely was noticed being broken after updating to v10a.

[Dima P.]

Hello Unreliably-Recurring,

Thanks for sharing your case, I'll review it with QA folks. Cheers!