Disk storage in BE2012

[Dannyboy75]

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to Backup Exec so please bear with me if I am asking stupid questions.

Each weekend we back up our Exchange 2010 store to a 1TB external USB drive connected to the BE server. One full backup pretty much fills this disk (>90%), so when the next weekend comes around the job generates a storage error saying insufficient space.

I reduced the retention period from 1 week to 5 days but this made no difference. Is this because BE won't overwrite the most recent (or only) backup set, regardless of the retention period?

Anyway I found another 1TB USB hard drive and configured this as storage in BE2012. I then created a storage pool containing both 1TB drives, and was hoping that BE would use them both, and just overwrite whichever one contains the oldest backup set (so it would effectively alternate between them). However, this didn't work as expected, so I assume I'm misunderstanding the concept of BE storage pools.

Is there a way to make BE effectively treat these two drives as a single storage area and overwrite whichever one contains the older backup set?

thanks

Dan

[pkh · Accepted solution]

BE 2012 will always use the first available storage in the device pool. The only way you can force it to use the other disk is to vary the first disk offline and then put it back online when you want to wrote to it. If you upgrade to BE 2014, then you can change the selection criterion for the storage in a device pool, e.g. ask BE to choose the disk with the most space

[Dannyboy75]

Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it.