BESR 8.5 with SBS 2008 USB swapping

[Lyle_Epstein]

I am trying to figure out a way to make the following solution work for my customer:

Currently, they have SBS 2008 and have two External USB drives. They have been using the built in SBS 2008 backup to backup to the USB drives that they swap every night. This seems to work just fine. I showed them all of the features of BESR and ganular restore, and they liked that. I installed BESR 8.5 and am attempting to setup a backup that allows them to repeat the same process of swapping USB drives daily for DR and offsite protection. I see no way of selecting multiple USB drives to perform this fuction, which is a fuction of the built in SBS 2008 backup. Is there no way of doing this?

[Jacob_A]

Please see the following article:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/295314

[Lyle_Epstein]

Jacob - Great article! I have a question though, if I go the route of the 3-REMOVABLE DISK MODEL
 can I use USB drives on the source server, or do I need to still have it backup to another computer with a network share (thus being another computer with a share on the USB drive) that would be swapped out? If you share a USB drive, and then unplug it, I believe windows will not just share the next drive I plug in as USB.

Another thought I had that might work in the 3-REMOVABLE DISK MODEL
 is this:

Source server has 1 External USB drive on it. BESR will backup to this drive. It doesn't leave or get disconnected. Two other drives, call them our transit drives, will be USB as well. If we have a batch file run daily, that basically copies our Fixed USB drive to the transit drive (doing it's erase on those as well), then will that work as a solution?

[aychekay]

While I realize this isn't Symantec's recommended method, I do have a tutorial here that doesn't require the use of any batch files unless the External Hard Drives are not large enough.

There are two problems with my method. The first problem is that it requires you to use full recovery points as opposed to incrementals. The second problem is that the correct external hard disk drive will have to be plugged in on the correct day and time.

Just a side note. Wondering if you have ran LiveUpdate yet. Just a couple days ago I was unable to install the BESR updates on SBS 2008, and, furthermore, attempting to install them corrupted my BESR install.

[Lyle_Epstein]

I ran Liveupdate without any issues. Your solution is good, but I don't want to use independent recovery points. I think if I do it the other method as I outlined above, it should work, since we are using a single drive as the drive that never leaves the site and we just use the other two drives to copy to....?

[aychekay]

Good to hear that you were able to install updates with no problem. And yes, I realize that my method of making only full recovery points is, from one point of view, less than ideal. However, I think making full recovery points offers a slightly higher chance of successful recovery. I suppose that could be debated.

[David_F]

The idea would be to have a fix storage location and then follow the technote to script copies from this fix location to the removable drives (locally attached or network) or with version 8 & 8.5 to use the Offsite copy option with the USB drives.

Using the Offsite copy would allow you to create incremental updates to removable disks. If you plan to use the GRO option from offisite disks be sure to always run a script to copy the current *.SV2i file from the fix storage location to the removable drives; otherwise share point and Exchange retrieve option may not be possible.