I'm having some issues with Tapeware 7 on my CentOS4 server. I have a Seagate DDS3(12/24 GB) tape drive in it, and Tapeware seems to not be using hardware compression. I think the model # of the tape drive is STD224000N. Tapeware says the media is full and asks me to insert another tape around 12 GB into the backup. In the diagnostics part of Tapeware 7, it shows hardware compression as enabled. I know I'm not ever going to get a full 24 GB on one tape, but I can't get anything over twelve on a single tape. Using tar, I can back up over 12 GB of stuff onto one tape just fine, so I don't think its any problems with the tape drive or with the tapes themselves. I have tried changing the software compression settings in Tapeware, however it doesn't seem to have any affect on being able to backup anything more.

After I installed Tapeware several months ago, I had trouble getting the tape drive to be detected when I used the st kernel module for it. (Which is what I have backed up over 12 GB of data with tar using.) For some reason, (and I think someone actually posted this in a thread here a while ago) I have to rmmod the st module, and load sg in its place. After doing that, Tapeware can see the tape drive as well as use it.

I kind of have a few questions here:
First, has anyone else had issues like this with tapeware and how did you fix it?

Second, could the sg kernel module be the reason that hardware compression is not working?

Third, do later versions of Tapeware work with my tape drive with the st kernel module? And might that solve my problem?

And fourth, does anyone have any suggestions for good backup software for Linux? I would use tar, but it doesn't use fast tape seek so it takes *forever* to restore single files. It also should probably support backing up to disk. Tapeware has never really impressed me that much.

Thanks ,

Oliver