Unable to use full capacity of removable disk drive

[THE_OCTOPUS_KID]

Veritas backup exec 11d + patches

Windows SBS 2003

Recently upgraded from exec 9 and additionally installed a 160GB hard drive on a USB port.

Data to be backed up ((C and D drive - mailboxes) + mailboxes, first storage group) = 50GB

Tape backup continues to work perfectly.

However comparable backup to the disk drive gets as far as approx. 30GB each time and then asks for a second disk.

We have a 7 day cycle and retention on the disk for only 5 days.

We also permit overwriting rather than just appending.

A) We do not want to use a second disk and

B) it is happening overnight when no-one is present to change the disk

Clearly we have misunderstood a particular parameter that must be causing this, but it is not obvious which one.

Any help would be appreciated

[Ken_Putnam]

How big is the USB drive?

What is your setting for Disk Space Reserve?  Remember that the reserve setting takes space AWAY from Backup Exec, it does not reserve  space FOR Backup Exec

That is if you have 500 GB hard drives, and have set the reserve to 450 GB (expecting to keep that much space for BackupExec), your backups will stop at 50GB and ask for more media