D2D R16 usb rotation?

[GStaver]

We are testing D2D R16. We are backing up to a locally attached USB
drive. We would like to implement a rotation of USB drives so that one
can be taken off site. Is this possible?

Another question. If we were to send the incrementals to the cloud and
needed to restore, would we need each incremental or just one to do a
full recovery?

[Kai Steinbach]

When rotating USB drives around, simply use the default Windows drive
letter, so that each of the drives shows up with the same drive
letter, despite being 2 or 3 drives. That's what I do, and it works
great: D2D simply starts with a fresh full when a completely clean
drive is found, and then continues incrementals for a week (until we
swap it). If the old RPs are not removed, it would then convert the
Incremental into a Verify job - which compares and writes only the
changes to disk. If that's desired, and the server is very big, I'd
recommend Friday evening for swapping drives.

D2D's cloud copy is done on a file level, rather than sending the full
image (full & incremental). So for a full restore, especially booting
the .iso / Bare Metal Recovery, one has to use the USB / LAN / SAN /
DAS copy of normal D2D recovery points, not the cloud.

helps?

[GStaver]

That helps tremendously. So when the same drive gets attached for the
second time and there is a full already on it, what happens then? Does
it create a new full and overwrite the existing? I know you said the
incrementals are turned into verify jobs.

One other question. Have you tried sending any incrementals to the
cloud? Or is that not even possible? Basically we want to have a
customer have 2 usb drives that they are rotating every week. And then
every so often we will go in and copy a restore point and house it at
our office. But I was asked if we could send the current week
incrementals to the cloud if possible. That way if there is a disaster
say on a thursday, we could restore the previous weeks image and then
pull down the latest incrementals to the cloud and get them up to
date.

Thanks for the help. You are very helpful!