On Tue, 13 Aug 2002 at 1:38pm, Scott Sanders wrote

> OK I know that's a bad thing to say around here BUT...

No, not really.

> ufsdumps (level 0 every night) to tape using amanda. My question is,
> since the drive is handling the compression what tape length should I be
> specifying in my tapetype definitions? For example should I use 35000
> mbytes or 70000 mbytes for a DLT-7000 with 35GB of native capacity? Or
> maybe something in between just to make sure I don't run out f tape?

Everybody's favorite answer -- it depends.  How compressible is your data?  
Our /home partitions here compress on average about 50% in software.  Our 
raw RF data on the RAID does *not* hardware compress in my AIT1 drive.

Start with some compression estimate based on your data, and lower the 
length if you consistently hit EOT.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University