Two-External USB Drive Backup System...

[Jesse_Shumaker]

I recently received Veritas Backup Exec 10.0 and have been struggling with coming up with a backup system where I can swap out External USB Disks each week and keep the same backup schedule. Here is my situation:

I have 2, 250GB USB External Hard Drives. My desire is to do a full backup each Monday night, and incrementals, Monday-Friday. I also want this to include a monthly backup that runs the 1st Saturday of every month. The plan is to swap out these external USB drives each monday. This will allow me keep one as an offsite backup.

In order to do this I have tried creating two devices which are "Backup-to-Disk" folders, inside of Backup Exec. One is called "Monthly - Full Backup" and the other "Weekly Backup". "Monthly - Full Backup" links to G:\Monthly and "Weekly Backup" links to the G:\Weekly folder. If I was using one disk this would work fine, but when I bring in the hard drive which wasn't written to when VERITAS created the "Backup-to-Disk" folder I get errors when running the backup jobs. My goal is to be able to implement the above mentioned system with only have to go into the server room to swap out hard drives.

Therefore, what do I need to do if I'm swapping USB hard drives every Monday?

[Ken_Putnam]

Are you creating standard B2D folders, or are you creating a removable B2D folder?

it should be the second, and when you re-connect the HD, just inventory it to let BackupExec know that it has been mounted, before attempting any other operations

[padmaja_rajopad]

Hi,

Try inventorying the second USB drive and then try running a job to it.

Ensure that a removable backup to disk folder is created...

Please let us know the error message that occurs while backing up....


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[Jesse_Shumaker]

How would I do two backup jobs, If the only way to do this is with a "Backup-to-Disk Device" folder? Remember, I also need to do a monthly backup the 1st Saturday of each month.

It seems that the "Backup-to-Disk Device" option will only allow me to have one backup job with one .bkf at a time. This was one of the reasons why I made the two folders. One called Monthly and the other Weekly. This allowed me to specify in the backup jobs whether I wanted to backup to the Monthly (1st Saturday) folder or the Weekly (Monday-Friday) folder.

Back to what you guys had mentioned. Are you saying that I would have to Inventory the Drives each time I put one of them in, on Monday? Also, after I have removed the current disk (which had backup jobs running to it) and insert the next disk do I simply right click the "Backup-to-Disk Device" in Veritas and hit Inventory?

thanks for the help

[patrickkuah]

USB??? the backup will be very very slow.....

[padmaja_rajopad]

Hi,

You are right....

On every Monday you just need to inventory the newly inserted disk as Backup Exec wont recognise the changed device unless inventoried upon.....


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[Jesse_Shumaker]

This still doesn't answer the question I had about storying two different backup (.bkf) files on each Hard Drive. I have the weekly jobs that run which creates a .bkf. and the monthly job that runs which creates a .bkf. How would I run both of these if I'm using "Backup-to-Disk" devices? It seems that you can only have one .bkf stored. This is in the VERITAS\B2D folder. What do you recommend?

As to the USB comment. It backs up around 66GB in 1 1/2 hours. This is USB 2.0 not 1.1.

thanks

[shilpa_Pawar]

Hi,

- Please note that Backup Exec for Windows Server is not designed to work in environments where the Hard-drives are swapped.

Refer this technote:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/276904.htm

An enhancement request has already been submitted for future revision of the product for this type of Backup-to-disk folder functionality (with drives that do not maintain a consistent connection with Windows) . We would like to suggest you to submit a request similar to this at http://enhancement.veritas.com.
When swapping drives or media, you will have either restart the services or create a new folder.

- Regarding the number of bkf files, refer this information:
If you have one Backup-to-disk folder and you are targeting a backup job to it, it will be appended for every backup and depending on the .bkf file size that you have selected it will create those number of files for a certain backed up data.
Eg: When you mention the maximum size of the backup to disk files as 2 MB and when 15 MB of data being backed up, there will be 7 .bkf files of 2 MB each will be created and one .bkf file of 1 MB.



Additional Information :
For information on the recent VERITAS Backup Exec security vulnerabilities, including links to the downloads for the necessary hotfixes, please refer to the following document:
Patch summary for Security Advisories VX05-001, VX05-002, VX05-003, VX05-005, VX05-006, VX05-007

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/277429.htm




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[Jesse_Shumaker]

Here's what I ended up doing. In order to use two USB external hard drives, swap them on a schedule, keep only one schedule, and use the same devices (I'm using "Disk-to-Folder" devices) and media, you must do the following. I will start with explaining how my environment looks and the work-around solution will be in relation to this environment. I am hoping this will help many of you, because I'm guessing many people are in a similiar situation.

I setup two "Disk-to-Folder" devices. One called Monthly and one called Weekly. The Weekly folder does incrementals each day and a full backup every Monday. The Monthly folder does a full backup the 1st Saturday of every month. When you initially create a "Disk-to-Folder" device it doesn't matter which USB drive is inserted. After you have created the "Disk-to-Folder" devices on the first USB drive, remove the drive and insert the other. Then open up explorer and make the Weekly and Monthly folders on this other USB drive. Go into backup exec and click on the devices tab, and then right click on the "Disk-to-Folder" device you created for the Weekly folder and click inventory. Backup Exec will detect that the drive inserted is not the original one and give two errors. Hit ok to each of these and notice how the "Disk-to-Folder" device for weekly has a red circle with a black x. Basically it can't find the original Disk. Now right click this weekly device again and hit online. Finally, right click the weekly device and click inventory to register the drive with backup exec. Do this same procedure with the other device and the new drive will be prepared for backup exec. This doesn't delete any of the existing .bkf's and gets around the drive swapping issue.

That is all you have to do. You don't need to create multiple schedules and devices for multiple drives. I sure do hope Veritas see's this issue and takes action on remedying this issue with future versions of backup exec.

I will let veritas know about this essential addition to Backup Exec