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How to enable a Job for Backup-to-Disk for rotating Hard Drives

Purecut
Not applicable
Hallo!

I'm a bit confused about to create a job that runs to Backup-to-Disk with a 14 days rotation

So let me explain what I have done:

I created a job (complete Backup) that runs from Monday to Friday on a Backup-to-Disk drive. This job is working all the time without any problems. During the creating process of the Backup-to-Disk folder I selected that not more than 5 Backup jobs should be written to the drive. I think what I made with this selection is that the next job an Monday overrides the backup job from last monday. Am I write with this?

What I need is: I have two external hard drives that I want to change in a weekly rotation for backup with the above job, but in the second week  backup does not find the Backup-to-Disk folder and do not run the Backup job.

So how must a create Backup-to-Disk folders job for the following szenario.

A external hard drive that will be exchanged in a weekly ratation. A job that runs from Monday to Friday and backups the data to a Backup-to-Disk-Folder on HD 1

On Saturday we change the external HD from No. 1 to No. 2.

The above job begins again on Mondays and backup the data to a Backup-to-Disk-Folder on HD 2.

The next Saturday we changed again the HD's from HD 2 to HD 1.

The above job begins again on Monday and beginns to overwrite the existing data on HD 1.

and so on.

I have no idear how to create this job. All I have done do not work like I want to do it.

Thank you for any support

4 REPLIES 4

Jeff_Gowlett
Level 3
Hi there,
 
I guess it depends on how you have created your backup to disk folders. If you are using USB or Firewire drives I think you can set them up as hot swappable devices - I have never used this, so I'm not much help there.
 
I use two Lacie 1TB drives for my offsite duplicate. These are actually an enclosure with 2 x 500GB drives that have been striped. In other words, they're a mini NAS. Because of this, I can't set them up as hot swappable devices. Instead, I have added them to a device pool.
 
If you go down this path, you will need to change the destination in the backup job to go to the pool aswell.
The only thing is, you will need to check the online status of each drive as you change them over. This only takes a second, and if it is offline, just right click on it and select online. I also run an inventory on the drive then.
 
If anyone else has a better method please let me know - although it only takes a second to check the drive status, it would be far better if BE could do it itself.

Ken_Putnam
Level 6
Jeff has you started in the right direction
 
But v12 STILL has a major design flaw, in that USB/Firewire drives can be detached but not swapped.  ie the only supported configuration is to dedicate a drive letter to each physical device  (MAJOR design flaw, IMNSHO, still with us since v9.0)  with two drives this isn't quite so bad, but  imagine if you had 8 drives that you rotated for Weeklies/Monthlies
 
As jeff said create a B2D folder on each drive and a device pool that contains both B2D folders, point your backup jobs to the pool. 
 
when swapping drives you can pause/unpause them to let BE know they are there/not there
 

RoninV
Level 4
I hear you on BEWS 'handling' the offline/online status of external drive when switching. For clarification, since we are going the route of using firewire drives for data backup, we have to create multiple B2D folders (one for each drive) under the Backup-to-Disk Folder tree? For example:
 
- Backup-to-Disk Folders
          Backup 1
          Backup 2
 
Do drive letters only play a part when it comes to using usb/firewire drives for backups? What I mean is, as long as the attached HD has a drive letter, it should work fine with BEWS 11d? For example, our B2D folder for full backups, created within BEWS 11d (Device tab) has a drive letter (Properties > General tab > Path). Does the drive letter, for the given B2D folder (Device tab), have to be the same each time the drive is plugged in? The B2D folder path (Properties > General tab) is greyed out. Will the use of the Safely Remove Hardware icon (systray), to remove the firewire drive from the W2k3 server, equate to the same pause/unpause Putnam/Gowlett mention?

Ken_Putnam
Level 6
You can use Windows Disk Manager to assign a drive letter, and every time that device is connected, it will be mounted at the same drive letter
 
As for the Safe Removal question:  I've not tried with v12, but in v9 and v10, the Pause/Unpause worked much better