You can use an external drive as your offsite copy destination. This method lets you take a copy of your data with you when you leave the office. By using two external hard disks, you can be certain that you have a recent copy of your data both on site and off site.

For example, suppose on a Monday morning you define a new backup job of your system drive. You choose a recovery point set as your backup job type. You set up an external drive (A) as the first offsite copy destination, and another external drive (B) as the second offsite copy destination. You schedule the backup job to run every midnight except on the weekends. You also enable recovery point encryption to protect the data from unauthorized access.

Before you leave the office on Monday evening, you plug in drive A and take drive B home with you.

On Tuesday morning, you find that Monday's base recovery point has been successfully copied to drive A. At the end of the day, you unplug drive A and take it home for safekeeping.

On Wednesday morning, you bring drive B to the office. You plug in drive B and Symantec System Recovery detects that drive B is an offsite copy destination. Symantec System Recovery then automatically begins copying Monday night's base recovery point and Tuesday night's incremental recovery point. At the end of the day Wednesday, you take drive B home and place it in a safe place with drive A.

You now have multiple copies of recovery points stored at two separate, physical locations: your original recovery points stored on your backup destinations at the office, and copies of those same recovery points stored on your offsite copy destination drives. Your offsite copy destination drives are stored in a safe place at your home.

The next morning, Thursday, you take drive A to the office and plug it in. Tuesday and Wednesday night's recovery points are then automatically copied to drive A.

See About using unique names for external drives.

Each time you plug in either drive A or B, the latest recovery points are added to the drive. This method gives you multiple points in time for recovering your computer in the event that the original backup destination drives fail or become unrecoverable.

Using external drives as your offsite copy destination ensures that you have a copy of your backup data stored at two separate, physical locations.

See How Offsite Copy works.