BE 10d for Windows 2003 Server with USB Hard Drives

[Systems_Admin6]

Setting up the drives as Removable Folders should be the answer. That was my next thing to try, but humour me for a second with this question.

I'm using 4 USB hard drives, configured as four seperate Backup-to-disk devices (BU1 to 4) added to a device pool (BUHDs). Backing up to the device pool works but for one glitch...

BE queries the device pool to determine which are online and which are offline. It errors out not finding any devices online after a HD switch. Doing this manually in BE by disabling the previous HD, enabling the new HD and running an inventory scan I get an error saying the device cannot be found and must be offline. If I enable the new HD again and re-run the inventory scan it works. So BE does not recognize the device on the first pass, but does so on the second. Is there any way to fix this?

Also, is there a way to create seperate backup files for each job on a HD like LiveState Server does, rather than one huge appended single file? I haven't looked at this too much yet, but figure someone may know a quick answer...

[Shilpa_pawar_2]

Hi,

Backup Exec does not support swapping different hard drives in an attempt to use different physical devices for the same backup-to-disk folder in Backup Exec

Refer this technote:
http://support.veritas.com/docs/276904

Removable Hard disk drives can be removed and reattached at a later time but they can not be swapped.

This may not work and is not supported. This is because both the hard disks will have different drive identification codes, which are hard coded.

You need to either create a new backup-to-disk folder or run an inventory, stop and start the services, and then run the job.

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[Systems_Admin6]

This, I understand as a limitation.



This is not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to use the different physical devices as DIFFERENT B2D folders, managed under a single device pool.

It's a very small network, so a 100GB single HD gives me room for almost 4 complete backup sets per drive. No need to span.



And this is how it's configured. Each has it's own B2D device created, and each is removed and plugged back in at a later time. They always show up as the same drive letter.

[Ajit_Kulkarni]

Hello,


I would like to know if you have tried the possible solution given in the previous reply.

Regards


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[Systems_Admin6]

Yes, I did.

As I said in my initial post, running an inventory on the device initially FAILS. It doesn't recognize the drive as being present, and marks it as offline. If I then manually set it as online (restarting the services isn't necessary) and re-run the inventory, it works fine. The same thing happens if I use 'scan' instead, only there's no error. If I run scan twice, everything else will work fine until the next day when the hard drives are switched.

I'd like to be able to have the backups run fully automatically, rather than me having to go through this manual 'setup' process every day.

[Ashutosh_Tamhan]

Hello Systems Administrator!

You could recycle the services of BEWS for which you could use the batch files bestart.bat and bestop.bat to automate the process by writing a script or so to do the recycle task automatically so that the reswapped device is recognised during this task and so that your backups then run without any issue.




Regards,
Ashutosh

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[Systems_Admin6]

Ah, now there's an idea. Is there a spot on the Website you could point out to me with information on editing the scripts and having them implemented?

[Ken_Putnam]

BESTOP and BESTART are two command files that should be present in the \UTILS directory of the CD (IIRC)

Create a CMD file that either calls the stop file and then the start file, or concatenates the two, then schedule that with the Windows Task Scheduler.

[Systems_Admin6]

Thanks, Ken. I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

[Systems_Admin6]

I never did get around to trying the batch files yet, but I did get some success with using the Removable Folders option. After much mucking about and re-setting the drives up one by one, it's pretty much successful.

There's only one thing now that eludes me. It looks like the backup jobs are broken down into smaller files, and they're not uniform size (ie. 3GB, 9GB, 15GB, etc.). So, say several 'media' pieces are created on a drive for a single backup. It started that one HD in particular (I think) would run out of space. So I'd delete the files from it, 'scratch' the media in BE, and re-run the job. This went away, but now it comes up with a database corruption error every so often. Again, I just delete the older files on the HD, 'scratch' the media in BE, and it works again for a few weeks.

But why is it slicing the backup jobs into smaller bits? I haven't changed any settings for the folder to be different than they were before, and have specified 100GB as the max single backup size.