Using removable disks for offsite storage

[Westcana]

I have a small NAS that I use for backups.

The built in storage is used for daily backups, and removable USB disks are rotated to provide offsite backup.
Full backups are performed weekly for both onsite and offsite and differential are performed on weekdays for both.

The removable disk is shared on the network using smb. The path to the removable disk remains the same when the removable disks are swapped out. I have the storage for the removable disk configured as network storage.

Currently, I can't tell if BE is aware that the storage device has changed. I tried swapping out the removable disk, then perform a restore. It appears that the files were restored, even though the storage that the backup is using doesn't have the backup on it. I'm thinking that the restore is using the onsite backup?

Is there a different way I should be setting this up? I was thinking that BE would write some sort of signature to the disk and would detect that the backup device had changed, even though the network path has not changed.

[pkh]

You should re-think your scheme.  Unless the removable disk is attached directly to the BE Server, there is no way for BE to know whether the disk has been changed or not.

[Westcana]

I plugged in an external disk to the server and changed the target for the backup.

When I ran the backup, it processed very slow. around 115Mb per minute.

the same drive backed up at over 3,000 Mb/minute when attached to the NAS.
I did a big copy to the USB drive from the desktop and it transfered a 4Gb file at about 25Mb/second, so the speed of the drive doesn't appear to be a bottleneck.

Should I setup the USB drive storage as a disk, or a disk in a pool? I'm doing it as a pool with only one disk plugged in at a time. Would that cause very slow backup?

[Colin_Weaver]

You should use a pool of USB disks as then the same job will use whatever disk is connected when it starts. If you don't use a pool you will need a complicated job definition with to handle the drive swap.

With regards to the performance that is probably down to the hardware (disk read/write performance)  as writing to a share uses the same elements in Backup Exec, the only difference is that the file system driver (of the OS) redirects the data over CIFS instead of writing through the USB bus (I assume you are at least on USB 3 connectivity against drive, USB interface AND cable technology)

[Westcana]

I am able to transfer a 4 Gb file in less than a minute to the external drive if I copy/paste in a desktop session.
So I assume that means that both the local disk array and the attached USB drive are working.
However, when I try a job in BE, the data rate is less than 200 M per minute. It takes all night to process 90Gb data.
I have compression disabled.

Surely if the problem was with the data transfer speed, it would also happen when copying from the local disk to the drive as well.
Yes, USB3. I checked to see if there are any bios updates, or USB updates available from the manufacturers website, but I already have the most recient ones applied.