9.2.2.6 Toggle Use of Double Buffering

If your machine is slow or heavily loaded or if your tape drive is too fast, it will start and stop the tape every now and then. This is unhealthy for both, the tape and the drive. To avoid repeated starts and stops of the drive, you can use double-buffering. By collecting a large buffer of data and writing it at once, you reduce the number of starts and stops.

In fact, starting with release 1.2.9 of KBACKUP , the term ``double buffering'' is no longer correct. MULTIBUF does handle this now and allows you to have an arbitrary number of buffers in memory that get filled and written one after another. This will keep your tape drive streaming most of the time.

Note: this is only intended for use with tape drives. For all other media this hardly makes sense, so better do not try it then.

This is extremely useful when using compression or encryption because these operations reduce data throughput. However, you will see how your tape drive performs without double-buffering and then you can decide whether to use it or not.