Hi all
Looking for solution options for a small client who will be running BE 2014. They want to do nightly backups that will goto 2tb USB 3.0 drives that will be rotated out each day and brought offsite. We're looking at having 5 drives total, one for each weekday. Unfortunatly, they can not backup to AWS or something else over the cloud due to the system that they're backing up being completely offline (long story).
I know this was possible with BE2012 - we've done it before with a storage pool. Essentially, BE didn't care which drive was inserted, it would backup to that. If they skipped a day of rotation, they'd get 2 backup sets on the drive if there was space. We've done this before with Western Digitial My Passport disks, setting the disk ID to unique ID's before inserting into the BE system.
Questions:
- Is there a new / better way to do this with BE2014? I can't seem to find any formal guide.
- This client has almost 2tb of data that needs backing up and unfotunately only has usb 2.0 ports. We're looking at adding USB 3.0, but if that's not an option is there a way to safely implement a strategy that does a full backup over the weekend to the connected drive and then incrementals throughout the week so there's not huge amounts of data that needs to be copies during the week? FYI, this is a hyper-v w2k8r2 evnironment, there will be some complete VM's being backed up, others where we just backup critical data. There's an Exchange 2014 server too that we absolutely want to protect both in full and with granular message recovery.
a) I worry about a recovery, figuring it which bits are on which disk for recovery. Is this an issue or does BE2014 indicate which disk is needed?
b) I was also thinking of having some sort of deduplication strategy in place as an alternative, but I don't know how this would work with rotating disks - especially since we can't guarantee that the client will rotate correctly. Thoughts there?
Any guidance would be apprecited. Seems like something that a lot of end users would want to implement, and I'm hopefully that there's a way....