Drive Rotation Recomendation for BESR 2010

[Formula84]

Currently looking into BESR for a change to image based backups for our clients.  We have been on the tape game for ever using BE 8-2010 now that disks are so cheap an most of our clients have one SBS Server, we started looking into image based backups (turned onto it from integrated 2008 Server Backup from recent setups). 

Question is I downloaded the trial for testing, one problem I see is the Daily rotation.  Currently we have full backups daily to tape and have a monthly rotation, then we store monthlys and keep a yearly archive as our standard policy.  Moving to Disk Based Backups is going to need a rotation strategy.

What is the Best Practices for Drive rotations?

From what I see already there is the off-site copy option, this is good except only problem is Backup runs @10pm backup completes and copies to the off-site copy... how does this handle different drives?  Say I have off-site copy enabled backup runs, copy is made, then the off-site swap disk has the needed data.  Client comes in in the morning swapping the off-site copy, then new off-site has nothing on it, when the next backup runs it copies to the new blank drive all files?

If this works then great but idealy i would like an apporach that would require less hardware, above senario would need 3 Drive for a daily rotation... 1 Permanaent and 2 swaps.

With Server Backup on 2008 Servers I can Setup 2 Disks as part of the destenations, which ever drive is avilable is the one it uses.  This is great as there is no need for a permenant backup + 2 swapping off-sites.  With this I can have 2 drives and always have one off-site and not need to worry about which one is where it just works.

If the above can not be accomplished (i don't see how with current settings) then what would you all recommended?

Setup typical for Server looking to do, 1 5.25 Bay that houses 4 x 2.5" Hot plug Drives. 

How can I best utilize the above hardware with BESR 2010?

I thought that I could give each Drive a Letter and Assign Different Jobs to Each Letter, although I am given an Error that I am unable to create a new schedule for a volume that is already backed up?  This sucks I was hoping to have a monthly Full backup to a designated drive for Archiving Purposes.  Without being able to have more than 1 Backup Job per Volume I am veryy limited on my options.

Any help/recommendations would be greatly appreacited.

[Symanticus]

Hi Formula84,

is this for Backup exec or the Backup Exec System Recovery ? I'm also curious if this is possible using mapped network drive as well.

[peterkaegi]

You can set BESR 2010 up in a way that will copy to an offsite disk, no matter what disk you put in. It just has to have the same folder destination i.e. K:\symbackup (that's what I use). You can use USBDLM to make sure your USB drives are always assigned the same drive letter.

However, you would never guess this from the GUI. I had to argue MANY times with Symantec to understand how the above is possible, as the GUI is not intuitive at all. Some of their techs claimed it was not possible. I finally got on to one that showed me how to do it. I have to say that support for Symantec is WOEFUL. The techs are difficult to get on to, and can be quite aggressive at times. The phone system (as with most offshore support teams) means a long lag while your talking, so the conversations feel incredibly awkward. That's the world we live in now I guess :(.

Further, the error reporting doesn't handle the above scenario very well. It will complain that you have "Disk x" in when it is expecting "Disk y" etc. even though there is no specific day set up for specific disks (!!!). Very odd.

However, it can and does work, but will a little bit of setting up. Once its set up, it works quite smoothly. Restoring of backups to VM is the way to go for testing of backups. With most servers it works extremely well. I think despite the issues, this is a great product, I just wish it wasn't owned by such a company as Symantec.

Good luck. Let me know if you need details to set up the offsite stuff.
Pete K

[Formula84]

Problem I have encountered is that you can not scedule a Incremental backup of a volume more than once.  I am not to happy with the way BESR handles drive rotations.  We were hoping to use multiple drives and have the same backup job run on multiple disks just as Server Backup 2008 functions.  With Server backup I can specify multiple target drives for use of the backup and what ever drive is plugged in it get used and has incremental since that last backup was run on that drive, great idea.  On Symantecs side they force you to use a drive letter which I thought would be ok but that way it works is terrible, If I have Disk 1 in Monday Backup runs a starts a new Set, runs all week and I have the Recovery points set at one month, I put in Disk 2 the following Monday it starts a new recovery point which makes sense, but once I go back to using Drive 1 again it will not pickup where it left off and starts another set and ignores the previous ones.  I was hoping to get incremental dailies with having 2 daily rotational drives(therefore 2 seperate incremental sets on each), only thing I can do is setup 1 dedicated drive and setup 2 others to be off-site copies.   This is bad for me in 2 ways, an extra disk is needed in this current path and also it now leaves me with 1 failure point as the backup set that on Drive 1 is duplicated to 2 and 3, but lets say there is some unrecoverable error not with the disk but the recovery points themselves now all 3 drives have the same bad data on them.  With the Server Backup method I have 2 indendant incremental reocvery points.