Configuring backups to USB hard drives

[Clay_H]

I am having trouble setting up backup jobs to USB hard drives.

I'm running Windows Server 2003, and trying to back up less than 200GB of data to 250GB Western Digital Passport USB drives (NTFS formatted). I have 11 drives that I rotate on a daily basis, unplugging one from the server every morning and plugging in the next one. My intent is to run full backups every night that will not exceed the capacity of a single USB hard drive.

Problems have been: 1) Backups failing to start; 2) backups that I do get started taking in excess of 8 hours to back up less than 100GB of data to the USB hard drive; 3) excruciatingly tremendous drag on server performance when backups are running. I've read the Backup Exec online help, several threads in these forums and others, but I haven't been able to find current, definitive answers to these questions:

1.  With multiple USB hard drives, can all 11 drives be mapped to the same letter (F:/, in my case), or must they be mapped to different, static letters for me to achieve my goal?

2. Should I be creating backup-to-disk folders, or removable backup-to-disk folders on the USB hard drives?

3. Does BE12 now support hot-swapping of USB hard drives?

4. Does the size of the backup file(s) BE creates on the USB drives affect the speed of the backup operation (i.e. file transfer rate) or the drag on server performance during the backup? In other words, during a single backup operation, does having BE create one big file versus lots of smaller files have any impact on 1) the speed of the backup to the USB drive or 2) the performance of the server during the backup operation?

Thanks, in advance, for any help with this. And, please, responses proposing I switch to tape are not what I'm looking for. ;) Thanks, again.

[pllobell]

Clay - I'm having the same issue. Hopefully someone can chime in here soon to help us out. If I figure it out I'll post my findings here.

Thanks!

[Clay_H]

Well, I've figured out acouple of things in the meantime:

1.

[Clay_H]

Whoops - prematurely ended that last post. I've found that, for my configuration (Backup Exec v12 running on Windows Server 2003):

1. All USB drives can have the same drive letter (F:\ in my case) and still work.
2. Backup-to-Disk (B2D) folders work for the USB drives.
3. The backup-to disk folders I've created on each USB drive each have a different name. I've not tried to give them the same name, but I suspect that will not work, as the media created within each folder by the backup job are associated with that folder by Backup Exec. Thus I fear that creating a folder with the same name may produce conflicts within Backup Exec. I may decide to test my theory later, after I comfortable the other bugs are worked out.
4. Regarding B2D folders that display erroneous messages that devices are "offline" or have "low disk space" in the Devices tab of BE, I've found the way to clear those is to Pause the device and then unpause the device in the Devices tab. Tedious, but I understand scripts can be written to handle this automatically. I will experiment further and post here again.
5. My failed backups appeared to stem from checking the "Allocate maximum space for backup-to-disk files" in the Properties dialog for the back-up-to disk folder. While that box was checked, my backups stayed in the Queued state indefinitely and a file called @@@@@@@@.bkf was created in the B2D folder on the USB drive. After unchecking that box, the backups ran normally.
6. I've not figured out whether the backup file size is a factor yet. So far, I've gotten my backups to run reasonably quickly with the max file size set to 2GB, but I've not yet experimented with other max sizes.

Any help is still appreciated, as I still feel as though I'm poking around in the dark. Thanks! :)

[WiseBadger]

We are having a different, though possibly related issue.  I am running B2D using BE v.12.5 on a Windows 2000 server, and backing up to a shared 500GB USB external drive on another server (Drive F: on the backup server).  If I run a test backup with a few folders and files from our network everything runs fine.  However, when I run a full backup overnight (approx. 10 hours to backup) the job queues prior to the verify, and I can't get it out of the queue.  I can successfully inventory the drive and the individual backup files on the drive, so it appears that BE is recognizing that they are there.  By the way, I have used both 4GB and 40GB limits for the B2D files, and both work the same way.

I did notice in the Alert log that database maintenance was run automatically during the full backup.  Could this affect it?  If so, does anyone know how to shut this off on the night that we run the full backup?  Any other suggestions?

[Larry_Fine]

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@WiseBadger wrote:

I did notice in the Alert log that database maintenance was run automatically during the full backup.  Could this affect it?  If so, does anyone know how to shut this off on the night that we run the full backup?  Any other suggestions?

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You cannot shut off the database maintenance by day-of-the-week, but you can schedule the time.  Maybe running the database maintenance during the day will help your issue.  Go into Tools | Options |Settings Database Maintenance and chenge the time there.

I assume you have to cancel your full backups that hang at verify?  Can you successfully manually run a separate verify job the next day?  That will prove that backup is actually verifiable, then we have to focus on why it is going queued.

[WiseBadger]

Thanks for your suggestion with the database maintenance.  I will adjust the time to see if that resolves the issue.

Yes, we do have to cancel the job when it hangs up in queue.  We are not able to run a subsequent manual verify on that backup job, because it does not find the B2D folder and once again hangs up in queue.  We can successfully run a small backup and verify job to the same device, and this works consistently (only creates one B2D file), after the job ends we can successfully inventory the Backup-To-Disk Folder, but a manual verify fails on this also.  This does not seem to make much sense to us???

We had an idea that we might increase the maximum file size to a point where one backup file will handle the entire backup job (400GB or so).  Is it possible that this will make a difference with BE's ability to find the media that it is looking for during the backup/verify job?  Is there a potential downside to doing this?  What is the advantage (if any) to having multiple smaller backup files created by one backup job?

[WiseBadger]

Problem Solved!

We were originally sending the B2D files to the root of the external USB drive (which was shared on our network).  As it turns out, this was causing the issues that we were having.  When we created a shared folder on the drive called 'Backup', everything started working fine.  Additionally, we went back to other drives that we had previously used, created the 'Backup' folder, moved all of the B2D files into that folder, and everything works fine with them as well!

Thanks for all of the suggestions!