Backup Exec 11d to USB with GRT and Disk Reserve

[Jamison_West]

I have clients using SBS2003 with Backup Exec 11d. I am using Exchange Server GRT and backing up to external USB drives. It works well, but I need to set a 10% disk reserve (i.e. 50GB on a 500GB disk). I know that isn't a "best practice", but has anyone figured out a way to keep at least 10% of a partition free on a backup USB disk in Backup Exec? I have 3rd party monitoring software I cannot switch away from and it complains very loudly if any physical disk (including USB) has less than 10% available. I think I can stop using Exchange GRT and use the legacy backup method and then disk reserve is OK, but that isn't really what I want to do. Please advise.

[Ken_Putnam]

When defining the B2D folder, you should be able to specify a disk space  reserve - space not available to Backup Exec - to anything that you want

[Jamison_West]

Thank you. I have done that, at it does seem to be working to a degree, but when it gets to 50GB free I get a "low disk space" error and the media becomes unavailable for backup. It doesn't seem to overwrite anything to do more backup jobs. The overwrite period is 10 days and there is stuff from about 6 weeks back, so that shouldn't be an issue. There is a ton of old stuff. I read that you aren't supposed to use disk space reserve with GRT, but that seems illogical. Thoughts?

[Ken_Putnam]

The overwrite period is 10 days and there is stuff from about 6 weeks back, so that shouldn't be an issue

Hmmm

Were all the previous jobs Overwrite, or were they append?

[Jamison_West]

All overwrite.