Retrospect v9.5 broken... how to solve this?

[sowen222]

I run a backup every week, and I keep a few years backups. Until now, every December I would transfer the snapshots from the past 3 years, and use that as the base for the coming year, thereby discarding the 4th year. Next year I'll have built up 4 years again, and will discard the oldest year. Also, I'd only keep one snapshot from every month for the first 2 of those years. It would take a day or so to transfer all the 400 or so snapshots to create the new base.

 

"Transfer Snapshots" is now essentially broken in v9.0 and 9.5. I started the usual transfer, and instead of a day to transfer all 400 odd snapshots, it had only transferred about 3 after 4 days!!! At this rate, it won't finish the transfer in a year!!! Retrospect Support acknowledged the problem - still not fixed despite the upgrade from 9.0 to 9.5 - and suggested I use "Transfer Backups" instead, but I can't see how to transfer a backup and drop the old snapshots.

 

"Forgetting"/"Grooming" snapshots takes ages because Retrospect developers after 4 or 5 major versions STILL have not made it possible to perform multiple selections in the backup-set properties "snapshots" window, so you have to go one by one and it takes ages. I'd just like to select several at one time, select "Forget", and have Retrospect do its work. Quite simple to implement, really, just enable multiple select and then process them in a loop.

 

Using a selector with "backed up before 1-1-2012" doesn't work either, because that would eliminate files that are still on my system, unchanged since 2011 (and hence only backed-up once).

 

So how do I get rid of the 65 snapshots from 2011 plus all the weekly snapshots, leaving only the monthly snapshots? Any suggestions?