Question : Problem: Using NTBackup and two USB external hard drives

Ok the server has Windows SBS 2003.  We are going to use NTBackup and two external usb hard drives for backup.  One external hd will stay there for good, the other will be taken offsite on the weekends.  I plan to just setup a backup schedule that will send the backup to both drives nightly.  My question is since the second drive will only be connected for some of the backups (around 5 out of 7) will it cause the backups to fail when it is not connected?

Also any tips on ways to schedule/implement this better would be great. Thanks.

Answer : Problem: Using NTBackup and two USB external hard drives

How can you be so sure the building will never burn down during the week?  Or that there will never be a flood or earthquake, hurricane or tsunami during the week?

Put simply, this is a potentially dangerous plan, having both drives on site over 70% of the time.  I would not recommend this.

Of course, this does somewhat depend on exactly how important your data is... but generally, it's best to have 3 drives, one that's ALWAYS off site - and not next door - off site like 50 miles away in a different topography.

I would suggest you read over my backup comment (it started as a comment here and grew into a web page).  

http://www.lwcomputing.com/tips/static/backup.asp

Note: In the Links section, the first sub topic is "My Scripts" - you might want to download this and try it - I've been working on it to use at my clients who use SBS - first live beta test was tonight and though it generated some error messages I've not had the chance to debug, it has worked otherwise effectively to perform the backups.  (You would use the Task Scheduler and schedule batch files to run the specific backups you want).