Backup Jobs with USB Drives on Backup Exec 2012

[SabT]

Hi all,

I have an issue which I am not sure how to solve. 

We have a Customer (International School) where we have installed BE 2012 V.14.0 32 bit (recently) and setup backup jobs to backup their 2 Servers (on QNAP -NAS) and now they've purchased 2 USB drives that are being a Backup to the Backup (don't ask why...) which should run as follows:

They have 2 Servers (as mentioned) whereby each Server should be backed up on every weekend (not to interfeer with regular backup) One Server on Sat the other on Sunday.

USB HDs are on a different Machine so this should be set through a UNC Path - Path\share (so far OK). Those 2 USB HDs are going to be rotated every weekend (USB A and USB B).
Questions:
- By rotating USB Drives are the shares gonna stay? Or are they lost once a USB Drive disconnects?
- If we use a SW such as USBDLM (drive letter manager), should I assign one letter to all USB Drives (INI file), or should I assign specific letters to both USBs according to their IDs?

Any other suggestions that you may have?

I appreciate all your help up front.

Best Regards,

Sab

[pkh]

1) Why don't you connnect the USB drives to the media server?  This will make disk rotation easier and lessen the load on your network.

2) Since you are using UNC paths, as long as the share names are different, rotating the disks would not present a problem.

3) Whether you fix the drive letter or not, does not affect BE because you are using the UNC names of the shares.

[SabT]

hi there,

thanks for your reply. I was told that we can"t connect USB Drives to the BE Server but I am not sure why either. Dude that is dedicated (Support) for this Client is on school leave. However, I didn't think about a different UNC Path. I'll change that but there is another question that comes to mind:

Do I have to create (since we have 2 Servers that need to be backed up and this is how it is setup in BE 2012) 4 separate jobs (2 different UNC path + 2 Servers)? Just want to confirm that.

Anyways thanks again for all your help.

Best regards,

Sab

[pkh]

You can only backup from 1 server and target 1 storage per job, so you can work how many jobs you need.

[SabT]

OK thanks again for your help. You said:

"2) Since you are using UNC paths, as long as the share names are different, rotating the disks would not present a problem."

With this I need to specify the dates on which specific External HD is going to be backed up to?

For instance we have 2 Servers (A and B) and 2 USB HDs (A and B)

Both Servers are backed up to USB A on upcoming weekend (Server A on Saturday 22nd - Server B on Sunday the 23rd). Since there are 2 different UNC paths for USB A and USB B, do I need to configure the dates on which USBA and B are goign to be used for backup (every 2nd weekend)?

Or is the new BE so slick that will recognize Drives from itslef and determine which backup job should be run?

[pkh]

If you use a device pool and put these storage in the pool, you can then your jobs can target the pool, rather than the storage.  See my article below

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-rotate-external-harddisks-be-2012

[SabT]

yes (and its a great solution) but I have on each disk 2 folders one for each server, 2 total. Can I choose right unc path instead of choosing the entire device pool? And if I don't need to do that, how can BE recognize which job goes to which folder?

[Colin_Weaver]

If you do not plug the USB disks into the media server itself there will be no insert notification to enable Backup Exec to detect when you reconnect each disk. No insert notification = disk storage will remain offline untill you take a manual action. Hence you should plug the USB disks directly into the media server and is one of the reasons why we recommend using Physical Media servers (not that I know if you have virtualized them but that might be the reason for the USB limitation.)

[pkh]

If you want your job to automatically use the storage that is online, then you use a storage pool.  Otherwise, target your job to a specific storage.  However, if the storage is not online, your job will fail.

[SabT]

I just found out that the media server (BE Server) is virtualized (fro couple of weeks now) - please bear with me here, I just took over this case, so I am finding out things on the fly....

back to the subject: Isn't there some kind of command that can be executed as a batch file (Task) that puts the disk storage online (pause and upause as kth mentioned in one of his articles)?

I know and I understand what is the best way (and easiest) but I am trying to work things out as they are and I do appreciate your help. So my main problem is when they swap out those HDs, how to keep the Storage online...

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

Yes there is a command (or a sequence) that restarts all the BE services and as Device and Media service restarts it should detect if the device is there then

In effect a sequence of NET STOP and NET START commands

However you would have to find a timeslot when BE is not doing any other jobs to use this.

Basically BE is only designed to be aware of USB disks being detached and re-attached to the media server itself, anything to get the the detach/re-attach working when you have shares open from a remote host is currently not officially supported and anything you do to get it to work will be a workaround and down to you to test.

We also do not support any form of pass through into a VM for the storage device (USB disk, tape devices etc) as such the migration to a virtual media server should not have been done (too late now I guess)

[SabT]

We are going to do this manualy for now (USB HDs rotation). Thank you everyone for all your help.