Hi Collin, thank you for the update to this. I do have a question though. You say that
"4) Copying or flat file backing up the BKF files or IMG folders is NOT recommended - unless you shut down the Backup Exec services and copy the database at the same time"
I have a policy with 3 templates. 1 for the weekly full backup going to disk with a retention of 6 days, 1 for the daily incremental backup going to disk with a retention of 6 days, and a template that duplicates the first 2 templates to tape on Sunday.
Can you recommend a way to do this without having to backup the BE databases? My situation is similar but different from Ricks. We have a client mandated need to keep the backups for 1 month, but only have the disk space to keep a little more than 1 weeks worth of data. So the solution we were going to present was keep the last weeks backups on disk and then on Sundays duplicate the backups to a tape. This way if anything happened within the week a restore was easily available from disk, if a restore was needed from beyond a week we would grab it from the tape. From what you are saying here, it doesn't quite work that way, or is quite a bit more complicated... Or is doing this through the duplication process better somehow than "copying or flat file backing up the BKF files"