Veeam only uses half of my LTO-5 Tape

[sg_sc]

Hello,

I was experimenting with Veeam v8.0.0817 and backup to tape using HP Ultrium 3280 SAS with LTO-5 tape media. After reading and transferring +- 735GB of data Veeam requested a new tape, but my LTO-5 tapes support 1.5TB native and 3TB compressed (which no one achieves of course). I ticked the box for hardware compression, but I don't think that's working. But I at least expected it would fit +-1.5TB on the tape instead of half. Any idea what's going on?

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hi sg_sc,

Can you clarify was that during a single job run? Also please check what media set creation option is used in the Media Pool properties? Thanks.

[sg_sc]

It was a single job with 2 selections: 1 Backup of a number of VM's and 1 backup of an endpoint.
Media pool properties were left at default.
I canceled the job after it asked for it's 3th tape.

I have upgraded to v9patch1 and split the job in 2. Both jobs now just used 1 tape. Can't tell if the problem is gone because both jobs did not put any more than 700Gb on the tape.
To make sure I should have a single backup that is bigger than 1TB, but I don't have that atm.

[veremin]

The described behaviour looks strange. There might be some problems with tape not reaching its full capacity when a trap device misreports us free space value.

So, if the issue re-occurs, kindly, reach our support team for further investigation.

Thanks.

[orb]

We do have a customer with the same behaviour. Doing a full format before the backup helped a lot but it happens time.to time a tape is not fully used. It is a LTO3 tape from Hp (default windows driver) running with v8 latest build. We have a case open still undergoing.

[Dima P.]

Olivier,

In case you are not trying to append the data to tape in the middle of the media set, (you can append only to the tape media with the latest sequence number) - there must be something with the end of media code that is sent back to VBR by the drive. Can you share the case ID, so we could double check? Thanks.

[orb]

Hello Dima,

That's we understood, the tape device sends the information to Veeam about space. The customer is recycling a previously used tape with backup exec that's the reason we are enforcing a full format now before backup . It helps to reduce dramatically the frequency of not fully used tape to a couple in a 16 Tape set to one, max 2.

Case # 01705327

I know Veeam support planned to remote intervention with the customer, I checked the last job. It did not miss any tape but it was also much shorter.

Oli

[sg_sc]

In my case the tapes were brand new.

[Dima P.]

Oli,
Thanks for sharing the news. Please keep us posted on the investigation results.

sg_sc,
Please reach support team since log review is required.