I am using a backup-to-disk, duplicate-to-tape strategy, with nightly differentials during the week and fulls on the weekend. I have 2 LTO-3 single drives, daisy chained to one SCSI controller. In 12.5, I simply had both drives in a Cascaded Drive Pool, which allows them to be treated as one giant drive. Duplication jobs that fill the first tape simply roll over to the other drive and keep on going. 2 tapes are able to hold the full backups on the weekend, and 1 tape is enough for the weeknight differentials. I have a small shop that works 9-5 and (typically) no weekends. With 12.5, once I had my backup policy in place and tuned, everything Just Worked with no work required except swapping tapes once a day.
I upgraded to Backup Exec 2010 so that I could support backing up Exchange Server 2010. I noticed in the "What's New" document, this simple line: "Cascaded drive pools. On upgrade, cascaded drive pools are converted to device pools." I didnt think too much about it, went ahead and did the in-place upgrade.
Now, I have all kinds of problems. My backups do not nicely roll over from one tape to another after the first tape is full. I have to go put in another tape. I am no longer able to create a cascaded drive pool anywhere in the UI. I am going to have to re-assign my nightly differentials from the device pool to a specific drive (or go to 2 tapes, one per drive, which is an unneeded expense and hassle).
In essence, the cascaded drive pool capability is completely lost from BEWS 2010. There is no mention of it in any of the Administrator's Guides. I am now forced to do put in a lot of extra work to re-do my backup policy and selection lists, and work out what I can fit into one tape, and assign them accordingly. Or come in on weekends to swap tapes (I live 19 miles away, and would prefer to "have a life"). Or spend thousands of dollars on an unneeded robotic tape changer. Or spend thousands of dollars on LTO-4 tapes and a new LTO-4 tape drive (so it all fits on one tape).
I am not happy.
I have these specific questions:
- Why was such a nice and useful feature cut? I can hardly believe that it required much development resources to maintain this feature from 12.5.
- Why is there so little documentation that this feature is cut, with no suggestions on how to work around it for those of us who depended on it?
- Is there some kind of magical new feature in 2010 that will alleviate my pain, that I have overlooked?
