Many users, especially in smaller environments, wish to use removable disks as repositories, with disks being rotated off-site for disaster recovery purposes. Most users will configure all of the disks as a single repository and rotate them on a weekly basis. This will confuse the vRanger and break the retention policy because files that vRanger expects to find on the repo disk are not there.
The source of this problem is that vRanger expects to have a consistent view of the repository. When the disks are changed underneath vRanger, the savepoint files and global manifest files are inconsistent with the database.
The solution is to create as many repositories as you have USB drives. This procedure explains how to do this.
1. Plug in a drive and assign it a drive letter. EACH DRIVE MUST BE ASSIGNED A UNIQUE DRIVE LETTER. Let's assume that there are three USB disks. We will assign them drive letters F:, G:, and H:.
2. With the appropriate drive plugged in, create a repository for that drive. In this example, we'll call the repository for the F: drive Repo_F, the repository for the G: drive will be Repo_G, and the repository for the H: drive will be Repo_H. Create any required directories and shares as you would with any repository.
3. Create Backup jobs for each repository. These jobs will probably be identical except for the repository to which they are assigned and the schedule. As an example, if the repository is to be rotated on a weekly basis, we might schedule the jobs associated with Repo_F to run weekly, to run every three weeks, and to have a start date of September 1. The jobs associated with Repo_G will also run weekly, run every three weeks, but have a start date of September 8. The jobs associated with Repo_H will run weekly and run every three weeks, but have a start date of September 15.
In this way, a different repository is in use each week and the unused repository disks can be taken off site. Retention policy will work properly because the contents of each repository is consistent.
You cannot use space saving backups if you intend to rotate drives. vRanger will put the differential and incremental backups in the same directory. If that directory should be removed when the drive is rotated, the backups will fail. You must use only full backups.
Also, vRanger will not detect a drive as a repository if it is inserted into the running system. It must be connected to the computer at the time that the vRanger service is started in order to be detected as a present repository. This would mean that you should stop the vRanger service, change drives, then start the vRanger service. NEVER stop the vRanger service while a job is running.
You may experience a slow startup of the vRanger GUI if a disk is off-site as vRanger attempts to connect to each repository at startup time.
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