Backup Exec 2010 USB Drive Failing

[Realmcom]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with a client's server, they are using Backup Exec 2010 to backup to USB drives which is failing.  Unfortunately I'm not extremely familiar with the program and what little I know is unable to resolve the issue.

Basically the client has a few USB drives which they rotate on a schedule.  I am pretty sure the issue is that the drives are running out of space however there is plenty of room on the drives for 1 backup each, which is all I want.  For some reason it is trying to keep more than one backup on a drive and now the drives are full and wanting to swap drives to continue the backup process.  I want the backup to overwrite and fit completely on the one drive rather than fit over multiple drives.  For a full successful backup we're looking at about 280GB and the backup drives are 1TB.

Here is an error that I have copied from the log.  If you want any more information just let me know how to get it from the logs.

Backup- \\SBSSERVER\Microsoft Information Store\First Storage GroupV-79-57344-3850 - The media operation was terminated by the user.
V-79-57344-33935 - The backup-to-disk folder that was specified for this job ran out of disk space. The backup set has been deleted, and the backup-to-disk folder has been paused.
Either free some disk space, or specify a different backup-to-disk folder for the job. Before other jobs can use this folder, you must clear the Pause state. On the Devices view, right-click the folder and click Pause to remove the check mark.
 

Could someone kindly give me some assistance to resolve this.

[Realmcom]

I'd just like to add I don't mind if there is more than 1 backup per drive, but I specifically don't want a single backup to span across drives.

Also that the backup has been successful for a long time up until the last few weeks when it started failing, with the odd successful backup here and there.

[pkh]

1) To properly rotate USB drives, make sure that they are configured correctly.  See my article

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

2) BE will only span disks if the other disks in the pool are on-line and you have configured the B2D folders to span.  See my article

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-span-disk

Note that disk spanning does not apply to GRT backups which is what you are probably using.

3) If you are doing GRT backups, make sure that your jobs are set to overwrite and not append.  If you set them to append, then the .img files may not be overwritten.

4) Check the OPP of the backups sets.  Make sure that it is not set too long so that there are a lot of copies on your disk.

[Realmcom]

Sorry for the lengthy delay, I have been flat out.  As the backup has been failing for quite some time I decided to get all the disks, format them, and configure them according to the 1st link you provided above - as this is definitely not how I did it the first time around.

(I wasn't too worried about formatting and the failing backups because I have setup some extra backups on each server for now, which is being successful, just using the built-in Server backup).

So I followed the first link, however my problem is possibly related to step 4) Define a media set to keep your .bkf files

As I am not extremely familiar with Backup Exec I am not exactly sure what this is, I did some research on the knowledge base but couldn't find much on it.  Either way I soldiered on, finished the job setup.  This is the email report I received this morning:

The backup-to-disk device is offline.

This is typically caused by the folder becoming inaccessible due to it being deleted, renamed, or unshared. It may also be caused by a disk full condition. The folder state has been set to offline. Please attend to this condition. Additional detail may be found in the Event Viewer - Application Log.

Many thanks for the help - any ideas from here?  By the way, this is Backup Exec 2010 (not R2) edition and the client is not looking to upgrade at this time.  "It was working fine before so just fix it"  Oh dear!

Thanks

[pkh]

To understand what media sets are, read the Data Management section of the Admin Guide.