I'm trying to figure out the best solution for managing my company's external hard drives which are acting as backups that we take home weekly. Here's how we'd like it go:
1. I have two external drives, D Drive and G Drive
2. Week 1, bring in G Drive and connect to server, take D Drive home
3. Scheduled Full Backup runs on Saturday morning
4. Week 2, swap out D Drive and G Drive, take G Drive home
What we currently do is use Storage Pools. I have a storage pool with both G and D drives in it. I set them up as a job to run right after our regular weekly Full backup as a duplicate. Its data retention is 4 weeks. I've also changed the BE settings to "Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets." This way, if one of our external drives gets too big, we won't miss a backup because the space was too small, or if we happen to miss a week to swap them, we'll still have a backup taken. Is this an efficient solution?
One issue I'm curious about is the warning that the external drive is removed. Since we're rotating these drives every week, we need to remove them often. I'm used to the "offline" error messages you get when you remove a drive, but someone else isn't. How do I get rid of them?
We also have two more drives that we'd like to take backups every 6 months. One problem that I foresee in this is setting up a reminder for us to remember to bring the backup drives from home. Does BE have reminders for a soon-approaching job? What are some efficient strategies for doing a biannual backup?