Question : Problem: Backing Up to Tape -  Approx 45GB = 7.5 hours?

Goog Morning,

When backing up to tape -  Approx 45GB, does 7.5 hours seem a little excessive?

Our company is doing nightly backups, I'm not sure why they choose to do full backups
instead of incremental or differential, but the ammount of data is around 40-45GB. This
backup is taking at least 7.5 hours. They say they are using fast machines and newer
tape drives, but to me that just seems like a LONGTIME to backup 45GB?

Any opinions, or suggestions for reasonable/economical solutions are appreciated.

Answer : Problem: Backing Up to Tape -  Approx 45GB = 7.5 hours?

This amounts to about 1.6MB/sec, which is quite slow by any standard.

You need to describe your existing environment in more detail (used hard and software, average file size, local or network backup ...) if you want suggestions on how to improve things.

As you suggest yourself, switching to weekly or monthly full backups and daily incrementals will probably be the cheapest thing to do.