Issues trying to backup with Backup Exec 12

[williamt]

My boss wants me to keep a backup image of the exchange server every weekday of the week and store it on an external hard drive connected to the server. He wants to be able to go back to any image from Monday through Friday and be able to restore either the entire image or just a few files whenever it is necessary. Only thing is, I cannot find the option to keep up to 5 backups at any given time so that when the software needs to back up again, it deletes the earliest image to make room for the new one.
I use Backup Exec 2010 for my home servers, and doing this is very easy with BE2010, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where this option is on Backup Exec 12. Any help would be very helpful. Thank you for your assistance!

[Ben_L_]

Backup Exec does not do image based backups of servers, it does block level backups.  If you want to do image based backups you will need to use Backup Exec System Recovery.  If you are just looking to do a backup of the Exchange server every day and keep the backups for 5 days then you will need to configure the media sets to do so.

[williamt]

Ok then, lets say I want to backup the Exchange Database files to an external hard drive for each day of the week for the last 7 days... how would I go about doing that? I'm sorry if this sounds like such a stupid question but I have yet to figure this out =\

[williamt]

And btw... at my home server I am able to copy an image of my server's hard drives to an external hard drive with Backup Exec 2010... you're saying I cannot do that with Backup Exec 12?

[Ben_L_]

Are you using Backup Exec 2010 or Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 at home?

Just doing the Exchange databases would be the same as backing up the server, just create a backup job and select the Exchange databases, go to the device and media section to make sure the backup is pointed the B2D folder you created on the External drive and the media set is configured to hold atleast 7 days of information.

[williamt]

I believe recovery... thats probably why I can save the image.

How do I set it to hold atleast 7 days of information? Would this work with Exchange 2003?

[Ben_L_]

Yeah, that's why you can save the image.  You have 2 completely different products.  You may want to see about switching over to BESR if you're more comfortable using it.

As for performing the backups with BE12.0, I would suggest looking over the Administrators Guide (http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/297830.htm) Specifically the sections; Managing Media, Managing Backup to Disk folders, Backing up Data and Microsoft Exchange server.

[williamt]

Thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

Definitely second Ben's suggestion to read the Admin Guide, but here is a quick explaination of ADAMM 
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/192265.htm

Basically, if you want to run a backup every night, and keep seven copies, set the OPP of the media set to 6 days (if the job finishes after 2400 or 7 days if it finishes before 2400), and from Tools\Options\Media Management, select the option to "use overwriteable media in the target media set before scratch media".