BE 9.1 and networked USB drives?

[PCMonk-1]

I have an older server running ver 9.1 with a 20/40 DAT drive.  This tape drive is now running out of space.  I have setup a B2D job to go to a USB drive connected to a network share on a workstation.  The device goes offline when I inventory, test run or backup to it after the drive is swapped.  If I disable and enable the device it works fine until the drives are swapped again.

Any advice?

Thanks

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

BE doesn't see that change in itself. You'd have to re-add it as far as I can remember every time you swop the drives around.

Otherwise it's a restart of the services in order to detect which drives are connected after they are swopped.

Any reason why the USB HDDs aren't attached to the media server?

THanks!

[Colin_Weaver]

Craig V is correct in that BE will detect that the drive has gone offline but not detect when it comes back online and that a service restart is needed. However this would be true even with a locally attached USB disk in the version of BE you are using.

You would need Backup Exec 2010 R2 which has an enhancement for locally attached USB disks to detect the insert. However 2010 R2 will not help you with the remote USB option as we would only detect it on a local system.

So if you have to stay on 9.1 or have to stay with remote disks then you'll probably have to live with Service restarts.

[Ken_Putnam]

As well as a stop/restart of the BE Services, you should  be able to pause/unpause the device

Something else to think about, v9.1 did not support swapping physical drives on one B2D device.   The recommended procedure was to have a separage mount point (drive letter) for each physical device.  Some got device sharing to work, but as I said, this is totally unsupported

[PCMonk-1]

Thanks for all the replies.  Oh well, I suspected as much.  I am going to see if I can write a script to restart the services after the swap and see how that works. 

The pause / resume option looks promising.  I could write a script to pause the drive and run it after the job completes and then resume the drive before the job starts with the pre and post commands.  You think this would work?

[Ken_Putnam]

Don't think that that would work, as once the job starts, it has the device locked

You could use Windows Task Scheduler to do it though