Help me work out a Disk-to-Disk-Disk backup plan; plus some questions

[Halogenic]

Here's what I'm thinking for a Disk-to-Disk-to-[off-site]Disk plan; I'm looking for a critique and have some questions:

4 servers:

  DC, File and Print, Exchange and ERP/SQL

     -Windows Agents on all servers

Backup Exec Media server: BE 11D with a 1TB array for the B2D folder

My plan:

1) Weekly Fulls on all servers to the BE Media Server

2) Daily Incrementals to the BE Media Server that have a 45-day "life" before they get overwritten

1 and 2 make up the D2D part.

Now for the off-site "2D" part:

3) After each Weekly Full, I then Duplicate this set to a USB hard drive with Encryption

3a) if possible, I'd like to dupe all the daily incrementals over to the USB drive too [Is this possible???] (also with encryption)

4) the USB hard drive gets bubble-wrapped and goes off-site for a 5 week hiatus before coming back into the rotation (there will be 6 weekly USB drives)

5) On the last Friday of each month a new USB drive is inserted and steps 3, 3a and 4 are done. But this is a monthly archive and this USB drive stays off-site forever

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Questions:

1) With the monthly archive containing 1 weekly and 45 days of incrementals, does this mean that I can recover any file existing at the end of any day?

2) I have heard of problems using USB drives "like tapes" like I'm planning to do with the duplicate jobs. Will doing a quick format of the USB drive to wipe it and creating another B2D folder on it be sufficient to overcome the problems? If so, can this be scripted?

3) Will I have a problem restoring from the duplicate sets on any of the USB hard drives? I don't have to go through a slow catalog process before a restore will I?

4) What are others' experiences with D2D2D? For some reason, I don't see a Symantec "Best Practices for D2D2D" article. Is D2D2D not a good way to go? 

[David_Bond]

1) You will be able to restore files from the end of each day, IF, you have all the fulll backups that go with those incrementals. You say 1 weekly will be on the drive with the 45 daily incrementals, if you are doing only 1 full over the 45 days, yes, but from what you previously said, you would be doing full backups weekly, so you will need all the weekly full backups on there. If its 45 daily incrementals, then that would be 7.5 weeks (unless you just mean 45 days of backups, which would be 6.5 weeks). So for teh 45 day incrementals to be useful, you would need 6 or 7 weekly full backups on there also.

2) Not sure if the USB drive (or just removable drives in general) have problems, not tried backing up like that. But I think all you would need to do is format your external drive in ntfs, create a folder for where you want to back up the files to go, and then add that folder and the settings for retention you want in the removable backup-to-disk folders section in the media tab in backup exec.

3) I dont believe you should have any problems, backup exec should have catalogued the duplicate media when you duplicated it, and removing the drive will still leave it in its database, so it will still be there after you remove the drive. It should just ask for the drive back on restore (this is speculation, based on it requiring you to set it as a removable B2D media ).

4)Cant comment on this, not done it.