B2D 3 network HD strategy

[jburke]

I have 3 Buffalo network harddrive.  My ideal goal is to have 1 drive off-site and the 2 other drives with current backups in the office.  I would like to be able to bring the off-site drive into the office every 3 months and replace either one of the two current backup drives. Preferably i would like to just walk plug in the off-site drive and walk out with 1 of the 2 office drives.   Does any one have a strategy for this or something simular even with just 2 drives, 1 onsite - one off-site?
I would also like to know what is the best backup strategies for B2D on 2 drives (ie duplication, no archive-bit, media sets)?  Is there a link that shows step by step instrucitons for setting up this type of solution.

I am running BE 10d (10.1 - 5629)
Thanks
Joshua Burke

[Colin_Weaver]

Some info before I answer this.

Most versions of Backup Exec have not been designed to handle removing USB drives as backup to disk targets - the removable B2D device type is designed for cartridge based disk media or CD's where they will always have the same drive letter because the hardware the cartridge or CD is installed into remains in the server. USB disks do not meet this criteria as if you own more than one USB disk and connect them in a different order they could swap drive letters and break the Backup Exec awareness of the device.

Backup Exec 2010 R2 in theory can now match an identiifier for the USB drive and change the drive letter if if finds it has been inserted on a different letter - howevertI have not yet seen the best way to configure this in practice (I suspect it still needs a drive pool but am not sure if it needs a Removable B2D configuration, or a B2D configuration.)

With older versions of Backup Exec some customers have managed to do what you are asking about as follows:
1) Use the operating system to mae sure that each of your USB drives has a unique drive letter and wil always get the same letter
2) Configure a different removable Backup to Disk Folder on each USB disk
3) Add each Removable Back to Disk folder to a drive pool
4) Target your backup jobs ot the device pool
5) Make sure the last backup job that runs to the USB disk each night is configured to eject the media at the end of the job.

[Ken_Putnam]

In addition to Colin's points, some who rotate external drives use a CMD file to use BEMCMD to pause/unpause all B2d devices, executed after connecting the newest one, so that BackupExec is aware of which physical drive is connected