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  1. Home
  2. Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume I
  3. Section IX. Administering NetBackup
  4. Management topics
  5. Units of measure used with NetBackup
Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume I

Units of measure used with NetBackup

For most units of measure for data, NetBackup uses the terms and abbreviations kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), and so on to mean the binary, or bitwise, values of each term. NetBackup does not use the powers-of-ten values, such as 1,000 for KB or 1,000,000 for MG.

When you calculate values that appear in NetBackup displays and reports, it is important to understand the difference between a unit's binary value and its powers-of-ten value. For example, a displayed value of 1.5TB actually means 1,649,267,441,664, bytes (the binary value) and not 1,500,000,000,000 bytes (the powers-of-ten value), a difference of almost 150 billion bytes.

The following table shows a number of common displayed units of measure with their corresponding bitwise names, binary multipliers, and actual values.

Table: Units of measure used in NetBackup

Displayed unit

Bitwise unit

Binary multiplier

Actual value in bytes

Kilobyte (KB)

Kebibyte (KiB)

2^10

1024

Megabyte (MG)

Mebibyte (MiB)

2^20

1048576

Gigabyte (GB)

Gibibyte (GiB)

2^30

1073741824

Terabyte (TB)

Tibibyte (TiB)

2^40

1099511627776

Petabyte (PB)

Pebibyte (PiB)

2^50

1125899906842624

Exabyte (EB)

Exbibyte (EiB)

2^60

1152921504606846976

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have adopted standards for these values. See the following articles for more information:

  • https://standards.ieee.org/standard/1541-2002.html (with a paid IEEE subscription)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541-2002

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000

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