Linux Backup – Tape Capacity and Routine on Ubuntu

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I have a HP Ultrium 5-scsi tape device on a Linux server and I'm currently using a HP LTO-5 Ultrium RW (model C7975A) tape and I have a couple of questions regarding this setup and does it work.
1 – It seems this tape can reach 3TB for storage considering compression. I'm not using any compression to backup a specific folder. Without compression, how much data this tape can hold? I couldn't find this information anywhere.
2 – I'm trying to do a backup from a folder that has 329GB and it's asking to insert a second tape to continue the backup process. Is this normal? The command I'm using to start this backup is tar cvMf /dev/nst0 var/Data/backup
3 – I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 on the server.

Can anyone share a light on this? I don't have much knowledge on this.

Best Answer

  1. LTO 5 has 1.5TB physical capacity without any compression.

  2. Not normal, and looks like there is already some data on tape. It is possible to check free space on tape - Determine remaining capacity of LTO tape