Hi D-Rock,
do not use appendable option on backups to disk. it's not a good practice. Use ovewritable option.

Regards,

JoaoMatos

These backups are about 400 gigs. I do not have the space to keep daily 400 gig full backups, and with budget cuts the way they are, I likely never will have the room to do it. If appending isn't an option, I'm going to have to do with 1 full backup a week, as company policy states I must keep 4 weekly fulls and a monthly full.  If appends were bad, would symantec really make it an option to make backups appendable?

Other alternatives would be appreciated.

 If appends were bad, would symantec really make it an option to make backups appendable?

it's not that they are bad.  In fact for tape they are an excellent way to use all of a tape volume, rather than just the first 1/3 or 1/2 over and over

For disk, files tho, they can make your storage almost impossible to manage.  Since all BKF files iin an  "append family" share the same OPP, which is reset when the latest is closed, you could conceivalbly wind up with a disk full of files, none of which are overwriteable/resuseable

Just for information IMG folders (that are created by GRT jobs are never appended to even if your job is set to append.) but each GRT job will cerate a new IMG fiolder but use a BKF file as a header (during the backup) and also use a BKF if there is non GRT data in the same job - this file will use the append rules.

Also for information we are investigating an issue (in BE 2010) where expired (overwriteable) IMG folders are only being erased on Full Exchange Backup jobs with the option to Overwrite at start of job enabled - if you are experiencing something like this (in BE 12.x or 2010) I would suggest you do log a formal support case.

Ken, While i appreciate the benifits appending has with tape... the same benifits apply to B2D. I have a 2 tb volume that I can use for this server to back up to. Using BES 12.5, I was appending just fine, and yes I did have to manually clean out folders once a week (which I scripted out, so I didn't have to actually do it myself every week). Appending worked just fine in 12.5 to a local drive, which I then used to coppied out to my 2 tb volume. A little cumbersome, I would agree, but the fact of the matter is that I was doing a full, with 6 days appending to it for a total of around 450 gigs at the end of the week. It's not efficient to backup 400 gigs a night when only 50 change over the course of the week. I'm required to keep 4 sets of weekly data, once the 4th set is complete, a monthly copy job runs. In total you are suggesting that potentially 31 days get a full backup + 1 monthly for a grand total of 12.8 TB. I'm a little shy on my nas.

What might be more acceptable is to run 1 400gb backup a week, with one monthly which would squeeze me in to the 2.0 tb mark exactly with no room to grow. If BES removed the append featur, then I guess I need to find a different product that fits my business model. We don't have the money to put in a 12 TB nas in, I don't know about the rest of the IT industry, but that seems to be one of the first departments that gets their budget cut when times get tough.

Colin, I don't believe I am seeing an issue like the one you mentioned. I just want to be able to get a GRT backup to B2D while being able to append.
Since I've received no reasonable suggestion at this point, I'm going to configure BES as if it were 12.5 again. Backup to local drive first and then copy that job to the nas. 2010 was supposed to fix all that mess... but we'll see what happens.

There is absolutely no reason that you cannot do what you want with all Overwrite Jobs, adn you would not then need to worry about manually clearing the B2D folder with proper management of your OPPs

Won't overwrite jobs remove my ability to restore some files? If I make a full backup on monday, and use overwrite jobs... come friday if I need to restore a file from wednesday, will I not have overwritten that data keeping me from restoring wednesdays data?