BackupExec 2012 - choosing disk from pool

[JRaposo]

Hi,

I have a storage pool with 2 disks:

- Disk Folder F - 1,5TB free

- Disk Folder G - 409Gb free

When a Exchange server backup (with GRT) ran, it choose the G disk - bummer... no space. Already read here that GRT jobs dont span over disks...

The F disk is used by other jobs, so BE is not ignoring it.

But when I tried to run off schedule the Exchange job (no other job was running at the time), it was chosen the smaller (less empty space) disk...again.

Is there a way to point BE2012 in the "right" direction ? Hey...look...that one is a better candidate!

A bit more info...These disks were used on BE2010 and doesn't look as the jobs stored on them were correctly migrated. I had to delete files as I couldn't access older jobs on a storage point of view.

Now the G disk says on Storage Trending "Remaining storage: 0 day" (hmm...there ARE some backup sets already expired, so BE can delete them) and the F disk says "Not enough statistical information is available" - which may say something about why BE chooses the G disk instead the emptier one.

Thanks in advance

[pkh]

You can target the job to the Disk Storage on drive F: rather than the Disk Storage pool.

[JRaposo]

Yes...but that doesn't solve the problem. That way I would have to costumize each job for a particular disk.

I guess the problem is the way BE chooses the disk from the pool to store the job. It seems to choose the disk "usually" used by this job. In this case, it would be better to choose the "emptier" disk.

Maybe a option to the disk pool on a future version ?

[pkh]

BE will always use the first available device in the pool.

If you need a change in this behaviour, you can suggest it in the Ideas section.  If there are enough users voting for it, then it may get implement in some future release of BE.

[josephG]

We have seen similar issues with disk storage pools after upgrading to 2012.  It has not caused any issues other than a few annoying emails at this point, but if we have X drives all of which are not in use and thus "free" BE will select the first drive in the list (In my experience its generally the lowest drive letter A being lower than B) and this trend continues until that drive is 100% full.  Once that drive is full it will continue to try, generate an error and will then continue on to the next drive at this point. 

As of yet this has not posed a problem for us in our environment, but for anyone who needs to run many concurrent jobs to the same site with a limited number of drives this could pose a large problem, particularly if they have a tight backup window to deal with.

As I said this has not posed an issue yet so other things have had a higher priority but please let us know if you have an open ticket you would like us to piggy back on and I would be happy to gather some statists/logs to assist.

[Marcel_G_]

Hello,

we have a similiar problem with Backup Exec 2012 (Including all offered updates) and disk pools. I have created a disk pool with four disks which have equal sizes. We would like to run different backup jobs with this disk pool as target. The size the backup jobs needed is bigger than one disk of the pool can store. Now we have the same effect as described above. It seems that the backup jobs not control how full a disk is and write on it until its full... It's very angry because i want to configure it as a dynamic and flexible pool which has so much intelligence to write backup job data to a destination with enough free space...

I think at this time the disk pool option is only for failover when a disk out of this pool fails...

Any suggestion how to configure?