Yes, you should use the balance space by creating more tapes. What capacity are the tapes marked full showing other than the one which is 67% & 2%, these could be a problem. On a physical tape, these could be media issues or I/O errors. Get this checked on VTL as well.

If you have too few large tapes they do not fill up over one day but over several days which means those large tapes have a longer retention than you might expect. There are no real benefits with having large tape sizes in a VTL, especially one with a relatively small capacity like yours - configuring it as an LTO3 does not make it go faster Looking at what you have you would be more sensible configuring these as LTO1 (40x100GB = 4TB) or even a lower capacity tape if you have multiple pools or a retention period more than a few days...

Well, the DL3D was setup by EMC at our site. Originally it was created with 10 VTLs configured as LTO-3 at 300GBs. I created a couple more tapes a week or so ago. I wouldn't mind using smaller tapes, is it easy to change now that the tapes are already created?

What I'd like to do is have AT LEAST 3 months of backups kept on the DL3D that way I wouldn't have to run offsite to restore a file from physical tape. I only have two pools setup right now with different retention times. But that might change if I added more tapes.

Back to my original question, and I'm only bringing this up because I still don't get it. Is the reason why NetWorker is reporting used VTL capacity differently than the DL3D because of NetWorker's retention policies and the DeDupe that the DL3D does?

A lot of the information that we backup is redundant, right now our DL3D is reporting a total reduction ratio of 5.23X. Does NetWorker not recognize the freed up space after the DL3D does it's reduction?

For instance, say NetWorker backs up 300GB of data to a virtual tape and fills up 299GB of it. NetWorker reports the virtual tape as full. But the next day the DL3D does its reduction and with DeDupe frees up 200GB of space. Now the DL3D is reporting that the virtual tape has 200GB out of the possible 300GB of space free for use. Will NetWorker see that 200GB of space that was reclaimed as free space again?

That is what I'm encountering and for some reason not understanding. Thanks for the help.

I think networker is not aware about the dedup reclaimed free space. Networker only will write to the volume until end of tape is reached and report the amount of data written. If deduping is done on the fly during the backup it would be affecting amount of data written before volume is full.

We are using VTL same way. All the incremental(Oracle archive logs, SQL logs etc.) data is written to VTL and kept there until it's expired. We have 100GB volumes and no dedup. Networker is reporting average 300GB/volume written. We have three different retention times and every retention has own pool.

VTL and NW numbers won't match as they refer to different things.

That's what I thought, that NetWorker wouldn't see the dedup reclaimed space but I wasn't 100% sure. Thanks for the help.

Thanks.