B2D and Removable Backup-2-Disk folders, rotating USB drives

[supersheep]

Hi all,

I've been following the posts about B2D and rotating external drives, but I'm still not very clear on the situation.

I've got a setup with five USB drives - one for each day of the week. They get swapped out each day, and they all mount as the same drive letter.

They're doing GRT backup of Exchange, and B2D of about 5GB of data in one backup job.

The problem I have is jobs constantly fail with "low disk space warning" errors, no matter what I do with the overwrite/append settings. Occasionally the Removable folder will disappear from the Devices window, and the only way to get it back is to unplug and replug the drive, then run an inventory job on it.

Does Backup Exec support doing this kind of rotation?

(I've been mining the knowledgebase and it's quite vague on the subject. http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/275624.htm - says you can't *swap* the drives, but the expiry date on the doc is last month.)

[Ken_Putnam]

Ever since USB and Firewire drives have been supported, Veritas and now Symantec have said that you can remove them, but not swap them (on the same drive letter)

I've always maintained that this is a serious programming deficiency, but they haven't changed the code AFAIK.

[supersheep]

Thanks for the clarification, Ken.

That does seem very odd - there must be a good reason for not including this feature. The whole B2D system seems rather crufty and unreliable, to be honest, so I'd guess including the feature would require a big rewrite of the B2D code.

It's rather like the issue with B2D and GRT backups filling the disk and not obeying media set rules - Symantec acknowledge the issue, but don't do anything about it. Sigh.

Guess it's time to shell out for a new tape drive :)

[Brian_Hammer_2]

I alternate between 2 external USB drives.  I just hooked both drives at the same time and let windows assign different drive letters to each drive.  This may be impractical to hook up all 5, but I would think there would be a way to assign a drive letter to each drive.  Althought it doesn't always seem to work 100%  as right now I swapped out the drives and have missed a couple days of backups because the backup job just hangs with "queue" status and when I cancel it the log indicates a media "mount failed"  I'm trying to figure out how to work around that now.

[Ken_Putnam]

do you Pause and UnPause the B2D folders each time you connect or disconnect the associated HD?

[supersheep]

I gave up on the first idea; client was just being stubborn.

The better solution was using a 1TB HD, partitioning it into two halves, one for GRT data and one for non-GRT backups. Then I set the overwrite protection period to five days, and leave the disk connected. That way, we've got five days worth of backups, and no messing around with different drive letters.

For offsites, the client just connects a smaller USB drive to the server, partitioned in two as above, assigned to different drive letters to the above. A once-a-week job runs and does the backup to that.

It works quite well, and I've had no problems with overwriting the bloody Exchange backups - when the partition is full, it reclaims space and starts backing up.