Hi Everyone,
We are currently evaluating Backup Exec 2012. I have been unable to wrap my head around how to schedule jobs the way we want since the availability window feature seems to be gone.
What we used to have: We used to backup directly to tape every night using 4 groups of tapes. We have a tape library which has 5 slots/10 tapes for each week, with 4 weeks worth of tapes loaded at any one time. (20 tapes loaded at a time, 40 tapes total). The other 5 tapes for each week are off-site and are traded out at the end of that week.
Now, with BE2012, we are trying to do a Disk to Disk to Tape backup. At night, we have all the different jobs backup to our NAS onsite. This works great and the backups are much faster now using this method.
The problem is then duplicating the data from the NAS and putting it on the tapes using the same system as before, except during the day now. I've already setup partitions on the tape drive, so that each week's tapes are on their own partition. However, I don't see any simple way to setup the jobs to duplicate to the different week's tapes.
In other words, I need a way to schedule it so only that week's worth of backups go only on that week's tape group. I can't find any way to limit a group of tapes to only be written to during certain times, and I can't seem to schedule the jobs so that "week 1 duplicate to tape" will only be triggered during week 1, and "week 2 duplicate to tape" will only trigger during week 2, without setting up an insane number of jobs and schedules for every single backup.
Is there something I'm missing, or an easier way to handle this situation?
