I feel like I'm trapped in a Catch-22 here...
I'm running Backup Exec 2012 in a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment with one 2003 R2 (6 servers total). I want to run my backups in the following way and with the following resources:
1. Each server: Full Nightly backup to removable HDD, expires after one week from job scheduled start.
2. Each server: Full Weekly backup to removable HDD, expires after four weeks from job scheduled start.
3. Each server: Full Monthly backup to removable HDD, never expires.
The problem is twofold:
1. Expirations happen the planned time after the backup COMPLETES. This is bad because there is no consistent predictablity as to when the backup expires. My drives aren't large enough to hold two complete nights of backup sets, so the backup jobs fail on account of insufficient disk space. I've already added the registry key to allow DLM to remove the most recent expired backup, but I can't see how that will help since the expiration period would happen after the backup jobs already tried to start...
2. The only way around this is to manually delete any backup sets in Windows when I rotate in the next hard drive and ignore the expirations. I can't imagine this is healthy for my server and it is a royal pain to remember every single time.
Am I missing something obvious here? Any workarounds or thoughts for my setup?
Thanks!
Oscar