Assistance needed in configuring this Backup Scenario

[BH]

I thought I had this plan set up right but I have two major issues in trying to get this to work:

1) An outside vendor seemingly has screwed around with the backup configuration
2) The entire rotation takes a month - so when I think I have it configured correctly I need to wait a month to actually see if it works, and by that time I start getting confused again as to how it was set up in the first place!

I am backing up a single Windows server with Exchange.
I have two external USB drives used for backup.
Backup Exec 12.5

I have two jobs configured - One for Exchange only and another for the rest of the data (files, System State, etc).

I am using Backup To Disk (not removable) Folders.

I am trying to configure the following:

Sunday - Create a new backup set and perform a FULL backup of all non-exchange data to USB1.
Sunday - Append a FULL backup of exchange data to this backup set.
Monday - Saturday - Append INCREMENTAL backups of both exchange and non-exchange jobs to the backup set

THE END RESULT BEING that I have a single backup set for the week that has the Sunday FULL (from both jobs) with the incrementals attached.

NOW THE TRICKY PART! For redundancy I want to duplicate these backups to USB2 using a duplicate job.

The duplicate jobs I want to keep for a month - In other words:

The copy of the weekly backup on USB1 will be overwritten every Sunday with the new full
BUT
The duplicate full backup set on USB2 Will be kept 1 month - This allows me to go back this amount of time for restoration purposes.

I get confused when understanding how to set the media sets and the overwrite periods to accomplish this.  Based on my understanding the append time keeps increasing every time you append to it (e.g.  append period of 1 week starts at whatever point you LAST appended to the data, not when the set was created).

I am open on other suggestions to configure this - as I may be making this out to be more complicated than it is - but I need to accomplish the following:

1) Keep Exchange backup as a seperate job (there appears to be too many issues - esp. with B2D folders if this isn't the case).
2) Perform 1 weekly full with incremetals
3) Keep 1 month worth of "weeklys" on a separate drive for archive and to protect against corruption on drive one.

Backup is not my strong suit and although I seem to grasp backup exec at one minute - as soon as I go back looking into what I've set up I being to get confused (esp with non-tape media and the way that the media sets/retention time work).

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

As far as I know, the only way to get Automatic Duplication is to create one job, and use the Template provided by Symantec to create a Policy.  I guess you could create two policies, but then you would be thrashing the disk on the first drive

Other than that:

APP is calculated from the time the first backup set is opened on the media, and is NEVER changed
OPP is calculated from the time that the last backup set closed on the media, and thus extends each time the media is appended

for example
APP = 5  days
OPP = 6 days

with the same media set,
Overwrite on Monday   OPP  is Sunday
Append on Tuesday     OPP is now Monday
Append on Friday          OPP is now Thursday
Append on Saturday     Job creates a new volume/append family, since the APP has been passed                                              



For your situation, use two media sets, one on USB1 and one on USB2  use an OPP of 1 week for both media sets, but from Tools\Options\Media Management   Select the option to "Use scratch media before overwriteable media in the target media set"

This will continue to create new BKF files until the disk fills up, then reuse the existing BKF files