Spanning backup volumes?

[leco]

Is there a way that I can get my 2008 server to use more than one USB external HDD for backups? The discs are WD 500Gb ones which are now too small to hold even an incremental backup. What I would like to do is tell the machine to split the backup across two or more drives. Is this possible or not?

[bossman]

@leco:

If your drives are in a caddy and you can seperate then I would be tempted to put them in a workstation that you don't use and put FreeNas on it and just run your backups onto that for now as you will have just short of 1Tb which would hold your data.

If you wanted redundacy then I would use either software Raid and add a couple more drives and use RAID 1 mirrored for a cheap solution to your problem as I don't think there will be an easy way to split your backups without some costly third party software e.g. Backup excec 12.5.

Of course I could be totally wrong here and some wizz with a backup script could help you out but then I could be right in my presumption.

[leco]

The drives aren't in a caddy, just plugged into the USB ports on the server. I was wondering about putting them onto another station, trouble is I don't have a spare one. As a make shift workaround I have MS Backup running on a 2003 server pulling data off the 2008 server onto a Bufalo drive. I set up a schedule in the summer (followed some advice on Edugeek for that) It does the job in a kind of clumsy way and only backs up the user files and settings.

Thanks for the input anyway. I've some more thinking to do on this one, just when I don't need it, but backups are so important.