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Date:      Mon, 19 Nov 2001 15:07:13 -0600
From:      Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Slow restores on a DLT4000
Message-ID:  <20011119150711.A7781@northernbrewer.com>

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I am a new owner of a pair of DLT4000 drives. I've been testing them
using dump and restore.

I get fairly good throughput on dumps; about 1.6 megs/second, which
seems similar to 'average' expectations that have been published.
During a dump, the drive does not stream, but runs, stops, rewinds,
runs, stops, rewinds... My thinking is that the tape drive is able to
write to a tape faster than my platters can provide the bits. 

Restoring data off a level 0 dump takes about twice as long as the dump 
itself, and it also fails to stream. 

Also, it takes just as long to retrieve a few files off of a dump as it
does to restore an entire dump. It seems like the drive simply reads the
tape sequentially, and if it sees a file I've marked, it writes
it to the disk. Consequently, if the file is at the end of the tape, it
will take 4 hours to find the file on a 20 Gig dump.

Is this (slow) behavior due to the way dump/restore works, or due
to the DLT4000? Is there any kind of drive/backup program that allows 
for some kind of random access on the tape drive?

(I used to have a 4mm DAT, and I seem to recall that restoring a single
file or two was very fast and efficient. It has been a while since I've
done it, though.)

-- 
Christopher Farley
www.northernbrewer.com

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