Configuring Backup to Run on Any of 3 Drives

[fortressjc]

Hi, we have three backup drives that are rotated on a weekly basis (recycle backup on Friday, normal backups every other day of the week). I've figured out how to create three separate backup sets for each drive, and set the schedules to run accordingly every 3rd week.

 

However, there are times when we forget to switch the drives (i.e. long weekends), and a drive is in the system for two weeks in a row, causing the entire schedule to be thrown off.

 

Is it possible to configure the backup set such that it doesn't matter which of the three drives is in the system at the time of the recycle backup, without requiring user intervention?

 

Thanks for your help!

[Lennart_T]

Retrospect is VERY strict about recycling etc to not cause data loss. Say you recycle last week's backup and then have a failure before the backup is finished.

 

Anyway, there might be a solution.

Schedule a recycle backup every third week for each backup set like the one you have now, EXCEPT you should only backup something small. Take the server's local C: drive, for instance.

Then move all the other sources to a Proactive script that has three destinations, the three backup sets.

 

Now, after a long weekend, the "Recycle" script will fail since the right drive isn't available. But the Proactive script will use whatever destination that is available, which means continuing on last week's backup set.

(This means you won't lose last week's backups in the recycle you wanted to do.)

[jgowing]

I wanted to do pretty much exactly this with 2 drives. I eventually figured it out.

I have posted my solution as a separate post

see http://forums.dantz.com/showpost.php?post/142042/