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RDX drives compatible with BESR 2010?

Wouter_Pinkhof
Not applicable
Partner Accredited
Hi there,
I try and sell BESR to all my server customers since I truly believe this is a superior solution. I am currently making an offer for a customer. It involves a server equipped with an RDX driver. Can anybody confirm BESR 2010 (the Small Business Edition) works (well) with RDX drives?
Kind regards,

Wouter
6 REPLIES 6

Andreas_Horlach
Level 6
Employee Accredited
Hello Wouter,

You can use RDX drive as a backup destination and can rotate the media in your configuration. If you run into any problems with your testing this solution, please reply and let us know so we can help resolve them.

CrisM
Level 2
Hello Andreas
I am using the trial of BESR 2010 and cannot see how it will handle the rotation of RDX media. The option to name the cartridges is not available (I presume as it is not an "external" drive).
Is there built in intelligence on which data cartridge is in inserted?
Thank you
Cris

Andreas_Horlach
Level 6
Employee Accredited
BESR sees the drive itself, and will create a backup the the drive, regardless of the cartridge in the drive. Thus, it is necessary to make sure the cartridge has plenty of room before inserting it the next morning. Because of the rotation, and if only 1 job is set up, the chain of backups is not maintained, and the automatic removal of the previous image. To remedy this, create 2 separate jobs (i.e. M,W,F) and use the same cartdige for those days, and T,TH,S for the next. Since you are not breaking the chain by using the same cartridge for that respective day, the previous image(s) will be seen and purged if you have the job setup to do that.

Andreas_Horlach
Level 6
Employee Accredited
One more thing - if your are looking to have an off site copy of your data, the best practice to do this with BESR is to create the image file to a specific location that does not change (USB drive, network share, internal drive, etc). Then setup the OFF SITE feature of the job to copy the image file to a specific location once the job is complete. Whenever you put a new tape into the RDX drive, and you have that drive as your off site location, BESR will sync the off site and you'll always has a second copy on the cartridge. Hope that makes sense.

CrisM
Level 2
Thank you for your response Andreas. I was also thinking of the idea of rotating the media (in this case, three cartridges) over different days of the week. Perhaps running as you suggest and using the third as a weekly backup. I attempted to do this by creating different backup jobs, however the option to use a Recovery point set is disabled, as the existing drive is already assigned to an existing recovery point set. This means that we can only have full backups on the cartdridge, so we will probably be limited to the number of backups held. Ideally, we need one full backup and incremental backups on each cartridge, running on different days of the week and the recovery points automatically purged. I can see that this is not possible with this current version of software. I don't like the idea of running a backup to the internal hard drives, as this serves no additional purpose and requires manual user input, which is not available at this customer's site. Thank you again for your input. If you believe I am incorrect with any of my findings, please advise.

CrisM
Level 2
With the fundamental issue with RDX drives that they are seen as "tapes" in effect, would Backup Exec be a more suitable product?