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Backup Exec: Restoring directly from External Drive

e3media
Level 3
Hello,

We've currently got a Backup server backing up a number of servers in our WAN onto its local drives (via a BackupToDisk job). We also recently bought an external 1.5TB drive which is connected via eSata. Every week or so I will copy all the .bkf files created by Backup Exec onto this external drive so that I can store it in our fireproof safe (just in case...).

Now my question is how I may catalog these files in Backup Exec so that I could restore directly from the drive (as opposed to having to copy them back to the directories they were originally backed up to) ?

I've tried mounting the drive as a 'removable backuptodisk device', but because there are a number of folders on the drive the device manager in backup exec does not recognise different folders containing different bkfs from different server backups. If you try and mount each folder on the external drive into regular backupto disk folders (eg _EXTERNAL Mail-BackupToDisk as well as Mail-BackupToDisk), then you can catalog, but this bizarrely only seems to work for a couple of the servers.

For the others, I get the error message

"Cannot create the Backup-To-Disk folder in the path specified because another Backup-To-Disk folder is already using that path"

when there aren't any backup to disk folders using that path. Could backup exec be getting confused because the paths are similar in structure (with a different drive letter)?

eg. external (where I copy files to) - Z:\Backup\FileServer01-BackupToDisk
and internal (where job backs up to) - F:\FileServer01-BackupToDisk

We are running Veritas Backup Exec v9.1 Rev 4691.

Hope I've made the issue clear. Thanks for any advice,

Archie
1 REPLY 1

DR0701
Level 5
Hi Archie

Would it be feasible for you to leave the eSata drive connected all week, but set up a duplicate job to copy the files from disk to the external drive each time a job completes?  This would save you having to copy the .bkf files yourself, and would allow you to restore direct from the external drive.

Hope this makes sense

Doug.