Finally got some downtime yesterday (as I couldn’t sleep early in the morning) to swap the tape drives around on our Windows 2000 servers.
Our server that used to take 2.5 hours to backup on a DDS4 tape which we then swapped to a DLT drive which then took 19 hours to backup until we loaded backupexec on it. This reduced the time back again to 2.5 hours. Yesterday I switched back to the dds4 tape drive without backupexec and its now back to 2.5 hours. We are not using BackupExec as its too expensive especially as we’d need the exchange agent to backup this server…..and seeing as though NTbackup is free there is no way we’d get something costing hundreds of pounds in instead (especially as it kept telling me the backup had failed on every backup yet it was able to restore data from the tape!)
All these problems were due to the Windows 2000 server hardware not being compatible with the tape drive, although why they sold us an incompatible tape drive I don’t know.