An LTO-5 tape needs to be fed at 50 MB/s (or more with hardware compression), and getting that much data out of your average NTFS filesystem is not an easy task.
Failing to do so, the tape drive will start “shoe-shining”, and the lifetime of both the tape and the drive will greatly suffer.

Real D2D2T helps by storing the backup data in an intermediate format, which is very similar to what raw data on the tape will be (while the filesystem data is pretty much randomly distributed on disk).

So real D2D2T would still be welcome!

However, I will note that the biggest problem we have now is that some of these servers are Server 2008, therefore with no NTBackup, we can’t do a single file backup at this point. I was told by your sales team that a single file backup to tape would also support sending it over FTP which would have been what we were looking for, although it does seem that RSync would be a better option.

Yes – Under Server 2003, using NTBackup, you can choose the “FTP” location. You can then choose what FTP server to upload to, and also where to put the intermediate Disk-based backup.

So you can do exactly what you want to do in this case.

On a side note – I should also mention that FTP is not bandwidth efficient, so if you have say 40 GB of data, then 40GB will be uploaded every day. However, if you use our Rsync backup method, which is bandwidth efficient, then only incremental in-file deltas are uploaded. I can do a separate blog post on this if it’s of interest to you.

Linus