Hello all,

This has been happening very often with several of my clients'
installations. The problem is as follows:

They have external portable hard drives setup for Backup-to-disk jobs.
In order to ensure disaster protection, the drives are swapped
periodically. The administrator takes the drive off the USB cable and
replaces it with the other drive, and takes one home. This is done
routinely, and the problem is that sometimes, not always, but very
often, Backup Exec stops doing backups because it says the device is
offline.

In order to facilitate simplicity, and even to consider the user may
not swap the drive every single day, I simply used the same capacity
drive, mapped to the same drive letter, and the same folder name for
the backup (for example: v:\backup)

I have encountered instances of this happening in version 10. and I
also think version 9 but I'm not certain about that. And it does not
always happen, only sometimes. At the times when it thinks the device
is "offline" the drive is there and accessible in Windows.

The Backup applet that's included with Windows has no problem like
this... if it sees the drive and folder, it backs up, as simple as
that. I realize backup exec treats things a little more
"sophisticated" (a debatable concept) but it seems that when the drive
is removed, it takes it offline permanently. The only way I am ever
able to get it online again is to use the services page and restart
all backup exec services.

Is there an update to patch this? I think in some of the installations
where this is happening I have updated to the latest build, but I'm
not certain. If there's a specific update that addresses this issue
please let me know. Or, if there's a set of steps needed to ensure
this does not happen please provide them for me.

Thanks

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