Yes, but you could stripe the full backup across multiple tape drives (if you have more than one tape drive). This spreads the database backup across multiple tapes, and makes reclamation of those files less problematic. Note: if you stripe a backup, you *must* send the backup to a collocate=filespace storage pool. Otherwise, reclamation could put more than one stripe for a particular backup on a tape, making restoration impossible. Additionally, TDP will allow you to backup differential backups of the database, and even transactions logs, directly to TSM storage. This would cut down backup time (but increase restore time). Hope that helps. Todd
ps.. we are backing up an 800+ GB SQL database using stripe=3 to LTO1 drives via SAN in 3-4 hours. pps.. if you implement a FULL with DIFF backup from TDP, make sure your database is not getting dumped to disk at all, or it invalidates the FULL on tape, but TSM is unaware of it. Thomas Denier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 09/23/2003 12:39 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Fax to: Subject: SQL server backups My company has a Windows server supporting a very large SQL Server database. Before the last hardware upgrade, the database was backed up with the SQL Server Connect Agent. Since the upgrade the database has been dumped to a flat file which is then backed up by the backup/archive client. Either way the backup arrives at the TSM server as a single file containing about 20 gigabytes of data. A single file this size causes a number of problems. The recovery log gets pinned for hours. Tape reclamation tends to perform poorly. The system administrator is now considering installing TDP for SQL Server. Would this software still send the backup as a single huge file?