Rotating USB drive for B2D goes offline

[Alex_Cooney]

Customer has 2 Maxtor USB external Hard Drives that they rotate weekly. When one is unplugged & the other plugged in, the B2D folder goes offline in Devices. Both drives read in Windows as E:, but BE loses access, until you Restart the BE Device Manager service. It doesn't say it is paused, just Offline

[Ken_Putnam]

Don't know why they did it this way, and I can't find the reference, but each Backup-to-Disk on removable drive,must be assigned it's own drive letter.

Does the customer use the Removeable Device Wizard to disconnect and reconnect the drives, and is each drive re-assigned it'sown, correct drive letter?

[Sharvari_Deshmu]

Hello,

We request you to update us regarding this issue.


Thanks,

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[Alex_Cooney]

Will be onsite 22/3 - will let you know the result then

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

Thankyou for the update. We shall wait for your reply.


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[734803674]

Just FYI - after reading this thread I tried using the change device wizard. No luck. The device comes up as online - even tests positive when you do a test run. Later when the scheduled job goes to run - it's offline again. I set up 5 jobs, one for each day. Did successful test runs on all of them. Monday Ran, Tuesday Ran, Wed, Thurs, Fri failed, Monday ran again. There is no pattern to what are called "offline" or not -and test runs fail to identify which ones will later be brought offline. You can right click, successfully bring a particular B2D online, and it will go offline again later when the backup runs.

I have a C: and D: drive that are hard disks. The backup goes to a firewire attached "H" drive that is a Maxtor One Touch. The One-Touch is never taken offline and is constantly available. I was rotating drives, but now I have a fixed drive, that is always connected and two drives that I copy all the files from the fixed drive to so that I can take them offsite. These other two drives rotate daily on and offsite. I did this to avoid having to mount and unmount the target backup drive - but the problem still exists.

[Alex_Cooney]

No go - Windows did not recognise the 2 Maxtor drives as seperate drives, so I couldn't set them up as different drive letters. I instructed the customer to disable the B2D folder in Device Settings in Backup Exec, then swap the drive, then Re-Enable it, then hit refresh. This seems to work on the Test run.
The B2D folder in BE would appear to be for non-removable disks only. It seems to have issue when the contents of the drive don't match what it put there last time - it isn't a drive letter issue.

[734803674]

Alex,

I'm struggling with the same thing - I'm afraid it's worse than that. I have a USB drive that does not change and the backup system just randomly assigns it as online or offline. Doesn't matter whether you use the Test run ahead of time or not. I believe there's a bug in B2D that Veritas isn't admitting to. Please feel free to give me a call (email is leedrake@gmail.com - I'll send you contact info) if you want to try to trouble shoot this together. It sounds like we both have the same problem. I simply can't believe that Veritas won't assign a live body to help us debug this. See my thread at:

http://forums.veritas.com/discussions/thread.jspa?threadID=60984&tstart=0

Which they've refused to provide any answer to, despite giving them lots of log info to go on.

[Brent]

Please post your resolution. We also bought 300GB Maxtor One Touch drives to use with BE and are running into the same problem.

Thanks.

[734803674]

If I ever get a resolution I'll let you now. At this point my resolution may be to purchase CA Brightstor which I know will do this job just fine.

[734803674]

This "kind of" works, but frankly this particular capability is broken in Backup Exec as far as I can tell:

I did find that if you use the Maxtor 1-Touch software to turn off the "sleep" feature of the maxtor drive that it improves uptime. My disk still goes offline on Thursdays for no reason I can discern. I only need to mark the media online after it goes "offline".

My setup:

One "permanent" backup-to-disk drive that remains at the customer site, and is never disconnected.

Two "swap-out" backup-to-disk drives that are exchanged daily and taken offsite.
A windows script that wipes the swap-out disk and copies the permanent to the swap out every evening after the backup completes.

This is MORE reliable, but not reliable. I do not believe that Veritas/Symantec personnel ever look at this forum, or answer any question. They want to drive you to their paid technical support for problem resolution - even though the problem is obviously a bug in their software.