Sorry for my lack of knowledge and experience with this but may I ask some more questions?
Regarding IDR: What I've read is that IDR is not supported from an external USB drive because it is not recognized on boot-up as a mounted drive, correct? So, in the case of disaster recovery... could I just load the same OS on the new hard drive and then perform a full recovery once the USB drive is recognized again? What type of backup needs to be performed in order to recover a hard disk completely?
Regarding file restores: you are calling the standby, the media server. That's just Symantec terminology for the server that has the backup device (in this case an external USB HD) attached?
Also, what do I need to install on the standby server? Backup Exec Local?
Do I need to install anything on the servers that I'm backing up or is it just a matter of specifying the files and their locations?
I realize this is probably off-topic, so if you want me to repost in a separate forum/thread, I'd be OK with that. If so, could you please direct me to what category my question belongs into?
Thanks in advance for your insight.