Best Practices for Backup-To-Disk

[hcccnc]

I admit it, I'm a dinosaur. I know tapes, I like tapes. But now I've got a client with these silly Dell removable hard drive cartridges. They're using Backup Exec 12 for Windows Servers. I can't seem to figure out the proper way to set up Backup-To-Disk for them, though. I know I need to set them up as a Removable Backup-To-Disk set. But how to I erase them when they're full? Is there a guide for how to set up your server when using these things? I can't make head or tails of the instructions in the documentation.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Found some here:

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/311711.htm

The rest is simply figuring out what your requirements are in terms of space available, free space before the service is stopped etc. That's something you need to play around with.

[Ken_Putnam]

I wouldn't worry about erasing the removeable disks, you don't erase a tape when you reuse it, right?

Use media set OPPs and APPs so that the data is protected as long as you need it, and then let BackupExec  reuse  the space on it's own

If you use Append jobs, remember that the OPP is reset each time a new job opens the BKF media family, and that all BKFs share the same OPP.  This means that unless you run periodic overwrites (weekly for example) eventually your disk will fill with bkf files none of which will expire for another xx days as set by the OPP