My customers are migrating from unreliable SCSI tape drives to external USB/1394 hard drives. The hard drives don't need "cleaning", don't generate write errors, etc... so I'm pleased with them so far. The WD passport drives are easy to carry back and forth and have performed quite well so far.

I'd like to use a 2 (or more) drive rotation where 1 drive is mounted and the other drive(s) are off-site.

So far, I'm frustrated with the default scheduling method in Backup Exec in terms of a week-to-week rotation. The BE scheduler seems to think if Dec 1 is a Friday then Dec 3-7 (Mon-Thurs) are part of week 1, NOT week 2. Friday Dec 8th is considered the first day of week 2. That is, each week has a start/stop day based on when the 1st day of the month is. This changes month-to-month and is a bit retarded if you ask me. I don't want my customers to get confused which drive needs to be on-line on a particular day. I think Mon-Fri would constitute a week, regardless of the any month-cross boundaries.

I'm considering other options, like running 2 jobs a nite, to drive X: and Y: If drive X: is on-line, it will run. If drive Y: is off-line, let it fail. That's not very elegant, and will generate email "failed job" messages depending on which drive is off-line on any given day.

I'm wondering if anyone has come up with a creative solution to a weekly media rotation scheme that works better than the Backup Exec default?

Thanks,

Paul