Need better control of new scheduled grooming (R7.0.301)

[awnews]

I just installed and took a quick look at the new Retrospect 7.0.301 (MS). The new feature I was specifically interested in was the new scheduled grooming feature. However, as implemented right now, it requires the user to set up a *separate* scheduled grooming script for each backup set. Since I have over fifty (proactive) backup sets, this doubles the number of scripts I have to set up and maintain.

 

Since I've turned grooming on a couple of months ago (after recreating the backup sets), I've noticed that groomed backups are taking much longer to run, probably due to the grooming step. Scheduled grooming is one way to try to deal with this, but since it wasn't implemented *within* the script it requires the user to create a bunch of extra scripts as mentioned above.

 

A few alternatives:

 

1) Put the scheduled grooming feature *within* the same script.

 

2) Put some hysteresis within the grooming function. It's not mandatory that grooming be performed on *every* backup once the grooming "limit" has been reached. It would be fine if the backup could expand to N sessions, be groomed back to N-M, and then expand again to N before grooming is performed again.

 

3) Make grooming a proactive function. That is, allow grooming to be performed *automatically* & *separately* from the (proactive or scheduled) backup during a global preference-defined time frame. That way grooming could be "proactively" scheduled to be performed during a time range (e.g. off-peak, between 11PM and 5AM) without needing to specify specific scheduled times. This works since the grooming activity doesn't require that the backup source be available as does an actual backup.