Question : Problem: Backup Exec, backing up to disc

Good afternoon,
Im faily new with backup exec, and currently use tapes to backup data, however I would like to start using off site hard drives.

The external hard drives are connected in a server and reachable via VPN, so dont need to worry about ftp.

However when I looked into this several months ago, I found I could either create a new backup every night (copy everything a fresh) or backup just files changes and over write exiting files in backup.

Is it possible to create a backup job to backup data to a network hard drive and keep the last 5 files of a file, not bothering backing up the file every night if nothing has changed, but if the file doesnt exist any more, keep the files for 6 months, and the delete the previous 4 modications and just keep the latest?

Thank you

Answer : Problem: Backup Exec, backing up to disc

The answer as mentioned above is no it's not possible.

Here is what you could do with backup exec;


Setup two (or more media sets) (go to media, click new media set)
Create one called "weekly and set the overwrite protection to 6 months"
Create one called "daily" and set the overwrite protection to 6 months
Setup a normal/full backup once a week targeting media "weekly"
Setup a differential backup every other day of the week targeting media "daily"

NOTE: THIS Will create a huge amount of data!  Without a data deduplication SAN/Applicance this is unrealistic, but this would go above and beyond what you'd want to do.  As a compromise i would do something like this but set overwrite protection to 1 month (if you have enough space).  If you really need to go back this far with your data i would suggest looking into a datadomain deduplication appliance.