BE2010r3 daily USB swap has all data but not a daily full backup?

[jay_dub]

I have some small business owners who would like to have a backup schedule that would allow them to take a USB drive, from a pool of 4, off site daily that has ability to do a full restore from the individual single USB drive.  Currently these 4 drives are being swapped in a daily rotation.

Is it even possible to have a generic rotation of these drives with BE doing a full backup then a differential as needed PER DRIVE? That is to say so that each individual drive would have a full backup and then all the differential backups from THAT drives full backup on the same disk. Seems very complicated and not even doable, but I thought I'd put it out there to the community. I don't think BE would be able to handle the differential for a specific USB drive / media. Thanks for any help!

[pkh]

See my article below on how to rotate USB disks.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-rotate-external-harddisks

Once you have the disks set up, just target the full and differential backups to the device pool and swap out the disk before you start a new full backup.

[jay_dub]

Thank you pkh for the fast answer!

I guess I'm more thinking about strategy. They want to have the ability to do a full restore from the USB disk they take with them out of the office every night. A full backup is now taking too long, so I was trying to figure out if BE can manage a full and incremental PER drive. So I do a full on Friday nights to whatever disk happens to be connected, then that disk will get differentials until it's plugged in again on a Friday 4 weeks later - since they currently have a 4 disk rotation.  This is probably not possible.

So then, do you know of any good documents or best practices for an off-site USB strategy? Like how many disks is best for a pool and then what about deep archiving - do you buy one a year or month or burn DVD's monthly? More of an overall strategy type question it seems at this point. They have not needed to do incrementals or differentials until now since the backup window is taking too long. Dedup appears to not work on USB disks which might have helped?

[pkh · Accepted solution]

You can put full, incr and diff backups on the same drive.  This is not a problem.  How many backup sets you can put on the same disk would depend on the size of your disk, size of the backup sets and the retention period.

For easy restore, you should put the full backup and subsequent incr/diff backups on the same disk.  If this backup chain is scattered on a couple of disks, then you need all of these disks when you do a restore.

There is no documents or best practices for an off-site USB strategy.  Each installation is different in terms on its needs.  The strategy will depend on the the size of your disks, size of the backup sets and the retention period. Also, how many disks you can afford.