Objective: Daily backups to USB hard drives that I can take off-site.
Conditions:
Just upgraded BE 10d to 12.5.
Exchange Agent for my Exchange 2003 MX.
Desktop and Laptop option for 10 workstations (when will this support Windows 7?)
Hardware:
Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U USB/eSATA Hard Drive Dock
5 1000BG SATA Hard Drives
Media Server: IBM xSeries 206 with DDS4 tape drive that is too small. IBM has no practical tape drive upgrade path for this older value server.
Antistatic bags
Protective case -
Pelican Case 1450 with foam plucked and pulled with room for ~8 hard drives.
Backup Exec Configuration:
Used Media Set Wizard to create media set that prevents data from being overwritten for 4 weeks. Infinate append.
Formatted HDDs on local workstation, named drives 'Monday', 'Tuesday', etc.
Used backup to disk wizard to create Removable backup-to-disk folders on each drive (didn't actually create folder, just selected drive letter of HDD in USB Dock)
Named each backup-to-disk folder the same name I gave the drive, 'Monday', 'Tuesday' etc.
Set backup size to 900GB.
Left maximum number of backup-to-disk sets per backup-to-disk file at the default number of 100 (is there a better number for what I'm doing?)
Size for low disk space threshold set to 100.
Associated backup to disk folders with media set created above.
Job Setup
Made full backups for everything (we don't have a ton of data but we have a ton of space).
Selected 'All Devices' for every job.
Disabled legacy tape drive in Devices window.
Making it work
In devices, every backup to disk folder is paused except for the hard drive associated with the day. If it is Tuesday, then the 'Tuesday' drive gets unpaused.
Every morning I pause yesterday's backup to disk folder, physically eject yesterday's drive, store it in the hard case, pull out today's drive, jack it into the usb dock, unpause today's drive, and get back to capitalistic endevours.
Each night, drives not in use go home with me.
What do you think!?
I'm still testing this out but wanted to post this to get input from those of you who have figured this out.
Be super great to see some kind of Best Practices or SOP from Symantec on how to do this.
