The following best practices are for effective disk-based storage management:

• If you want to keep backup data longer than the period that you specify when you create the backup job, you should duplicate the backup sets. A duplicate backup job can copy the backup data from the original storage device to tape or to disk cartridge, which you can then send for long-term or off-site storage.

• When you use the Configure Storage wizard to create disk storage, Backup Exec provides a list of disks on which you can create disk storage. The disks do not appear in alphabetical order. Instead, the disk that appears first in the list has the most amount of disk space. You can select any disk that you want, but the disk that Backup Exec recommends for use appears at the top of the list. The disk that you use as the system drive always appears last in the list. Symantec recommends that you do not configure disk storage on the system drive.

• Symantec recommends that you use a dedicated hard disk as disk storage for backup data.

• You should not configure disk storage and deduplication disk storage on the same disk.

• Before you create the disk storage on a network share, you must give read and write permissions to the Backup Exec service account. The Backup Exec service account is on the Backup Exec server that you want to access the network share.

• Do not delete or edit the contents of the BEControl folder, which Backup Exec creates on the root of the volume. Do not copy the BEControl folder to other volumes or drive letters.

• Do not delete or edit the changer.cfg or folder.cfg files. These files store information about the backup files.